


In the Land of the Blind

by Xylophone



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (2012), Thor (Movies)
Genre: F/M, Loki is dangerous, Other, platonic Thor and Loki, tafl games
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-01-13
Updated: 2013-11-10
Packaged: 2017-11-25 07:08:37
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 22,508
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/636386
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Xylophone/pseuds/Xylophone
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Thor confronts Loki after the events of The Avengers, and is drawn into the plot of what might be the most audacious trick the universe will ever know. A trick that may already be in progress. Chapter 3, Sif and the Enchantress face off over tafl games and a mission to Vanaheimr, and everything is misdirection.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Sentiment

 “ _I returned, and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all._ ” – Ecclesiastes 9:11

* * *

_He was afraid of what his companions would say when he asked leave to speak to Loki, shut away in Asgard._

_Tony Stark shrugged. “Give your adopted brother hell from us if you like. We’re the ones who won, and I don’t think he’s going to forget that any time soon, muzzled or not.”_

_Thor turned to the Captain, who said, “I don’t think you really need our permission to talk to him, if he’s somewhere he can’t hurt you or us. Go ahead, but be careful.”_

_He sought out the others, one by one. Bruce Banner, whose monstrous green form had beaten Loki into the dust at last, merely nodded his assent. He did not seem angry at all, and if worried, it was about something more distant and uncertain than a recently defeated god._

_After a few moments thought, the Black Widow said, “He’s vulnerable,” in a way that suggested Thor might wish to take advantage of it._

 

_The Hawk’s Eye was the one Thor most wanted to ask. Perhaps under Loki’s control he had learned something of his controller, or had gained some understanding of what Loki might want, or how he might respond. Or perhaps he would tell Thor he had no business speaking to Loki, that he didn’t trust them, and that he did ill to even consider approaching Loki with something other than anger and vengeance in his heart. But the archer just stared him in the eye with his piercing once-blue gaze in silence, and walked away._

 “They trust me,” he says, warning, testing his voice. Loki doesn’t move. He lies still on the floor of the cell in the dark, limned silver with Mjölnir’s spark of light, silent as a dream. “They trust me to hear your voice.  So I may speak with you now.”

At that Loki opens his eyes. Just enough motion to draw Thor towards him. But as he does so his glance falls to Loki’s pale still face, and he remembers Loki smiling at the pain he wrought on Midgard, gleeful enough to make him sick. Thor cautions himself not to forget that. But neither must he forget that he is drawn back by remembered brotherhood, and he must not to be swayed to rashness. Carefully he moves forward, and kneels to grasp the muzzle covering Loki’s mouth. “Loki,” he says, steeling himself, “I would have converse with you.” Thor cautiously pulls Loki up to sit beside him. His spare hand does not let go his hammer; it is too powerful a part of himself, when he must go into danger. Loki makes no sign, though. Maybe he smiles behind the muzzle, as regards Thor silently, just enough that Thor can see it in his eyes and wonder – wonder what he is thinking and smiling at. “Loki?”

Silence. And the smile, something that looks horribly sad, like just before Loki dropped from the edge of the Bifröst– or perhaps it is just taunting him. Nothing else. Thor waits, the stillness grating and his fingers twitching, waits for an answer until the mockery that Loki is making of him even without his words occurs to Thor suddenly and violently. Thor needs to know, needs to make Loki use his damned voice, and then –

Loki’s hand is over his, and Thor cannot tell if he is trying to make him remove the muzzle or pressing him to keep it in. Thor feels it, cold and twisted, and he sees a vaster grin than Loki’s in its mirrored surface. The thing is repulsive; in a reflex he all but rips it out of Loki’s mouth.

Loki only gives him a soft, wary look and glances away.

“ _How?_ ” Thor asks. The question bursts out of him before he can help it; if he’d meant to speak calmly and rationally before, he can’t – _How could you have done this_ , he thinks – how could _you_ have done this, how can _this_ be you, how, _tell me_. He’d say all this if he trusted himself, but despite his tension he is guarded now, against letting his feelings loose where Loki might –

Loki says not a word.

“ _Why_ did you do what you did? _Loki_.” But there is nothing, not the slightest sound or motion. “Speak to me. _Speak_.” But the god of Lies does not answer him, and the silence stretches out again.

Thor tries to collect himself. If Loki will say nothing, in some attempt to spite or anger him, he must simply leave. If Loki will speak no reason for what he has done, Thor will do no good raging; against this he is powerless. Better to abandon what he has started, even after so much delay and fear.

He had not told the other Avengers what he meant to say when he arrived before Loki, nor his father and mother – no one. On Midgard he’d had such little time, and he had barely known himself, had only felt keenly that there was some great wrong in what had become of the world, and that he must have it answer to him. _Loki could tell me why_ , Thor thinks, _but he will give no answer, if it is crueler to refuse it, even were it to his benefit._ Better to abandon Loki to whatever he has become, and condemn him to whatever evils he has condemned himself. Who was at least once his brother.

Thor’s face falls into his hand at that thought, and he screws tight his eyes and his throat. He has never felt so utterly alone.

The sudden brush of fingers on his own again and the clear jesting voice sting on his skin and in his ears. “Oh, dear Thor. Would-be brother. Will you weep at all this, now that you have made good your triumph?”

“ _Loki_ ,” Thor says.

“What do you care _why_ I have done what you call evil?”

In an instant, Thor’s sorrow feels like rage. He tries to say – “You raved that to feel emotion was to be vulnerable. And here . . .” Here the only things keeping Loki from utter destruction are Thor’s attachment to Loki, and his own control. And even those might waver, he thinks, as he looks down on the thing in the ragged body of his brother. He raises Mjölnir aloft, afraid.

“Oh, mighty Thor.” The soft familiar sound of false condescension spills from Loki’s voice. “Do you think I do not know that sentiment is the sweetest thing there is?” The words settle like dust as Loki smiles to himself.

“You claim to care nothing for it. You deride it.” This is Thor’s courage, this is what fuels his wrath, that Loki would – could – deny the bonds of the heart. That he could say affection did not shape his actions. When all of it, everything Loki had ever been and ever meant and ever done, is bound up with Thor’s heart, alongside Tony Stark’s limp body inside his armor, and the innocents screaming in Manhattan, and Loki’s laughter at it all.

“Since when have you trusted my claims, Æs?” Loki laughs a moment, and Thor flinches.

“ _Loki_. _Why did you do this evil._ Tell me . . . ”

Loki looks him in the eye.“ _Just a bit of fun_.”

In an instant Thor’s hand is at Loki’s throat. “You – you would play at lies amid lies amid lies even _now_. Now when you have caused such hurt and damage and _misery_ in Midgard you act as though it is a game, a trick, as though you _cannot care_ what you have wrought.”

Loki gives him a narrow look as Thor withdraws his hand. “Of course I care. Who acts without care, without motive? Hatred is sentiment as much as love. Anger is emotion as much as empathy.” Loki is speaking to the point now, as if in answer to Thor’s prayer. A prayer to the god of Lies. “And isn’t hating me the brightest thing inside you now, Thunder god? Isn’t grief for whatever bond we might have had and anything of it you might have cherished just fuel for that flame, for that purpose? Sentiment . . .”

And though Thor almost would snap his neck for that he restrains himself. “Do you wish me to say it is weakness?” He clenches his fists, willing himself not to anger, not to break. But both are in his nature, anger and breaking. “Do you wish me to be strong and send you to your fate?”

Loki stares him down, like a bitter foe, like a friend, like a brother. “I say it is the sweetest thing. You have decided to show me mercy out of sentiment, you and your mortal friends and the Allfather. Is that weakness? Or is it weakness when your hatred of everything I have perverted of the love you bore me makes you wish to kill me?” _No_ , Thor thinks, _none of that, I never wanted any of this._ He doesn’t want to kill Loki, he doesn’t want to rescue him; he just wants to understand why any of this had to happen at all –

“Or do you hope your mercy will shame me or anger me?”

This was the eloquence he had not drawn on during the struggles on Midgard, Thor sees. This was why Loki was named _Silvertongue_ –

“Which is true and which is the _lie_?”

Thor cries out, and sudden blue lightning ripples down Mjölnir as he smashes into the wall beside Loki’s face. The cell trembles but holds, and there is a tremendous rush of thunder to match Thor’s shout. He lifts up his hammer again, but _no_ , he tells himself. He mustn’t let himself break the cell, or break Loki. This is converse, this is not battle; more than that, this is _Loki_ , stripped of power and alone. So he masters himself, and the world quiets enough for him to hear Loki’s sad laughter, which hits him in the gut.

“It all strips us of control,” he says. Thor realizes suddenly that Loki did not flinch even as Mjölnir came down less than a hands-breadth from his eyes.“Even you, evenI, we are fools at the whim of the world. We do what we do because we must, because it is all we can do.”

 _No_. “You _chose_.” Thor throws words back now. “You chose to murder those humans. You chose to grasp for power, to conquer, to try to destroy Midgard.” It was no one and nothing else; only Loki, who had tricked Thor into caring that his brother of old was the monster he must take up arms against. The taste of the world he faces is bitter as ash in his mouth.

“If I desired to conquer Midgard, why would I act as I did?” Loki smiles wryly.

“You chose to grasp for power and let others suffer for it. You were cruel and selfish.”

At that Loki cringes. “You wound me,” he says flippantly, but Thor can hear the strain in his voice and wills himself not to wonder at it. “I am all that and more,” Loki continues, staring down at his own hands, quiet and serious. “And so are you, and so is everyone. But _think_ , Thunder god. Do not be so willfully blind. I acted to get as much attention from the humans as was possible. I made myself widely visible and my stated goal of conquest known. I killed a handful of mortals very publicly, with fanfare and pageantry, in a place where the weight of memory would stir up the most anger. I killed and terrorized enough to cause outrage and ensure reprisals, but not nearly enough, nor with enough harrowing force, to decimate or demoralize the people of Midgard. I were a fool to risk a conquest thus, do you not think?” Thor opens his mouth but there is nothing to say, nothing. Of the two sitting in the cell, he is the victor. Conflicted, burdened that it is victory over his brother. And yet, if he’d had to face Loki with his prowess and cunning entire – if Loki had played to win what he’d declared he’d wanted – might Thor be the one defeated, with Loki standing over him? But if Loki wanted no conquest – if that were truth – he would have no need to do such terrible deeds.

Loki continues. “If I had _wanted_ to rule Midgard I should have secretly used the spear’s power to gain control of the minds of her leaders, set them all to do my bidding, and ruled from the shadows until I desired to make my utter domination known. I had power enough for that.” He pauses, waiting for answer, but Thor thinks _he is a liar, he does not understand it himself, he lies._ Loki’s head snaps up, his words sharp and swift and terribly urgent. “ _Think_ , mighty Thor. I spurred the few capable of amassing power to organize against me. I did enough damage to guarantee that the Avengers would assemble, but not enough to kill you, or break you, or set you against one another. Just enough to make you aware of your differences and weaknesses, so those obstacles could be overcome. Not enough malice to truly divide you, just enough to forge unity between you, so you could set yourselves against me in defense of Midgard. With this very sentiment your weapon.”

“You underestimated us. Love spurs vengeance.”

“As if I did not know that, mighty Thor? I say again, if I had wanted dominion I would have acted otherwise.”

“You wanted to rule Midgard and enslave it. So you said and so you acted, if incompetently. What else?” Something worse, wronger, more abominable. Something that would make Thor hate himself for wanting to comfort the dejection on Loki’s face, and wanting to see his smile now instead of the bitter twist of his lips.

“I lied.”

“You still do. It matters not if you would make your deeds seem fairer for not having such foul motives. The foulness is that _you care not what you hurt_ whatever you do. Or else that your deeds are to the very purpose of causing grief.” And if Loki hadn’t wrought as much destruction as he could have if he’d dared – if he’d desired some different outcome or aim – Thor had been played and used by Loki’s cunning. _Used against whom?_ his mind whispers treacherously. He has no answers.

“If I wanted to destroy you and your Avengers and their world, would I have bantered with the man Stark in his tower? Would I have let him stand to offer me a drink and use such an obvious ploy as cover to prepare his machines to save him, so he might yet defeat me? Instead of pinning him to the floor and overpowering his mind or killing him on the spot when I had him helpless? Nay. I am not so _stupid_.”

It had lain too long, the knowledge that Loki would use his cunning where Thor used strength, and taunt him for it in jest. But now Thor has tasted wisdom, and he can hear false bravado and endure it without rage, if only Loki weren’t _always false_ , ever undoing what was once strong from its very beginning. “I do not care for your cleverness, if you still think it that,” he says carefully. He can hear the strain in his own voice, and the exhaustion. “You are my charge now, Loki, a prisoner in Asgard, whatever you claim your goals may have been. Perhaps you do not stoop to obvious folly. But that merely means it runs deeper.”

“Ah, but my folly _was_ obvious, to anyone who cared to look, so what was it masking then? You still believe that my defeat and capture were not _too_ of my design.” A smile flits over Loki’s features, playful. Genuine, almost.

“If you believe your twisted designs will not be bent to the wills of myself, and Father, and the Avengers, you are sorely mistaken.”

“Long long ago, it seems to me, Thor . . . if Loki were accused of causing mischief, he would be made to answer to it by righting what was wrong. He was given second chances.”

“Second chances. Not endless opportunities to spite the gods.”

“Second chances. Other roles. Different fates. What he knew to unravel he knew to rebind. What control he lost was revealed with time to be threads he’d woven with knowledge and clarity.”

The brother of Thor’s youth springs to memory, whose laughter was never cruel and harsh and heartless. “What clarity you once had is darkened.”

“At that you are wrong. That is another lie you would believe. That to think so was clarity. But –” Loki’s face twists in pain – “but I have learned now. There is no control.”

In his mind’s eye Thor sees the dead Midgardians of Germany, the helpless mortals in New York, the fires and smoke and blood and death and pain. Everything he couldn’t save because Loki had brought his madness there. He looks at pale Loki and his fists clench Mjölnir’s handle. “You _chose_.”

“I chose to do all I did. As you chose all your deeds. And yet you are torn one way and the other, by love and fear and a thousand other things so far beyond you or me or Odin even, let alone the mortals. So how are your choices different from mine?”

“I chose to protect the weak. Not to hurt them.”

“So confident in your righteousness. You fit well with the heroes of Midgard.” Loki speaks without disdain; he is only softly sardonic. “Do you want me to suffer for what I’ve done?”

Thor is silent. He could no more answer if his lips were sewn together. But Loki will not stop.

“How much do you want me to suffer?” Loki pauses deliberately and Thor’s silence hangs in the air while Loki’s questions come, slow and measured but relentless. “Do you want me to feel the pain I caused the mortals who bled and died because of me? Or do you want to shelter me from the wrath of your friends? Do you wish you could hate me as truly as they do? Do you wish you could wish more pain on me? Or do you wish you could make them see what I meant to you, what I used to be, where I went wrong, and make them sympathize?”

Loki bows his head sadly, as Thor would do if he could answer; but he cannot, so he mustn’t react. Now his brother’s voice turns soft.

“Did you wish you did not have to mourn me when you thought me lost over the edge of the Bifröst, because you thought the world sweeter with me alive, despite all I’d done to earn your hatred? Did you wish me dead when you found what I had since become? In the end did you wish you had not mourned?”

Loki reaches out a hand towards Thor, and their fingers almost link in the shadows. “These are all lies that tell the truth, Thor. We think we are free beings, free to choose what we would. Free to begin to shape the worlds to the way we think they ought to be. But what we want and what we can choose to do _will never coincide_. We have none of that freedom. It was no lie when I said on Midgard that I would set them free from freedom, if I could. Freedom is an illusion, dearly bought and bitter at the last, bitter with regret.”

At that, Thor clenches his hand around Loki’s, and in his other fist Mjölnir glimmers blue. “I will set _you_ free of this.” Loki laughs briefly, amused and distracted.

“And bind us all ever deeper,” he mutters.

Thor shakes his head. “What malice there used to be in your lies and tricks is not this – despair.” At the sound of the word from Thor’s mouth Loki draws his hand away. _Despair_ , Thor thinks, and wonders how it took so long for him to name what lies in his own heart.

“Thor,” Loki murmurs. “There are facets of the universe – if you could see them and hear them and know them – you would understand, so brutally, what I mean when I say that there is no control. I fell through the Nine Worlds, through space and time. And . . . even Æsir – or Jötunn . . . I think we were not meant to see the roots of Yggdrasil. Yggdrasil, the keeper of wisdom. The keeper of wisdom and fate. Do you know how long I fell?”

“Too long,” Thor whispers. He can hear his voice brush the walls of the cell, soft with fear.

“I fell for years and years. Eons. Ages without end. And yet I fell no time at all.” Loki’s breath catches in his chest. His silver voice seems stripped of artifice by exhaustion and the need to be listened to. And Thor has come for answers, has claimed to want to understand, so he cannot refuse Loki now.

“What did you see?”

“I was _everywhere_ , _”_ Loki tells him. “I saw everything. Every moment of triumph – of organization – of a plot resolving as planned – it all falls to chaos. There are no patterns to manipulate. There is no way of knowing. There is only the illusion.” The last words seem to catch in Loki’s throat, and he falls quiet and still. “There are only the patterns that manipulate you, that you cannot see until it is too late and the gate is sealed. Only the things that make you feel as if you have no control and yet all too much.” His eyes flicker in the pale sheen of Mjölnir. Thor tries to imagine falling into the abyss, with no way to stop himself, no way back. Loki, swallowed by a nightmare, which spat him out as this.

“You did not have to ally with the Chitauri,” Thor whispers. _Did you, was that your only recourse, was that the only thing you could make yourself do after everything changed?_ “You did not have to stand against me,” he continues, more firmly. “You were my brother still.” _Did you not know that?_ Before Loki brought war to Midgard, at least, he had been Thor’s brother in truth. Blood or no blood, and in spite of everything that had happened in the wake of Thor’s banishment. But now joy in destruction lies on Loki’s hands and in his face, and the change is so _wrong_ that Thor can’t know what Loki has become to him.

“But what you have done, you do not have to do it again, you do not need to _be_ it. I – Loki –”

A sound very like amusement worms its way out of Loki’s throat. “ _Loki_ was something that will be torn asunder and rent and unmade by fate. Or he already was. What you saw and thought of me, that was the illusion and the lie. I did not change. I was always as I am. Or I was always meant to be.”

“ _Nay_ ,” says Thor, thinking of his brother, clever and bright and full of fascination. Of him offering Thor his loyalty, and his love, and the hope that it was not a lie. _Never doubt_ , Loki had said. But Thor had doubted. “I’ll not listen to you perjure yourself.”

“I was and am the perjurer of the gods.” Loki shrugs. “Do you not think it fitting? Or if I am no god but a monster, is it perjury? Was your brother ever one to do what I did to you and to the innocents of Midgard?”

“Nay. Be thou not him,” Thor says, slipping for a moment into the painful familiar address. “Not that one, with the fey eyes and laugh and horrors in his wake.”

“But I am. I am Loki,” and there’s the grin, “and that’s what makes it so easy to tear out your heart. We will all be forced make the choices that rob us of what we are. And yet we must still be ourselves. That is sentiment. And that is what breaks us.”

“That,” Thor says stubbornly, “is not a reason why you did as you did. Loki, however you will, make me understand what _changed_.”

“You know not what is coming. If you did, Thor.”Loki pushes himself to his feet and stands over Thor, who sits back on the floor of his brother’s cell. “There are two ways I might proceed, two ways to solve the riddle. Or there seem to be two ways, but is there a choice, truly? One path is tearing out your heart.” He looks Thor in the eye, piercing, as if he knows exactly how Thor feels, and how to use it. “Renounce me as your brother.”

Thor hesitates for the shadow of a moment.“Nay,” he says, but he knows it was not reflexive, and the knowledge scares him almost as much as the fact that when Loki hears the pause he smiles.

“I’ve tried to make you see,” Loki says. His tone goes light and playful. “On Midgard you embraced me, and I stuck you with a thorn. A little enough hurt, to a mighty warrior. But it was me, it was your younger brother you felt plunge the blade in you. And your heart _bled_ for it.”

Mjölnir rises in Thor’s hand. Part of him wants to hurt Loki back for deliberately seeking to wound him. But he must not. He must not. “You can hurt me no more with that memory,” Thor lies. He must fight his way to the roots of his brother’s despair, one battle he cannot win with his hammer.

“I say the universe lies in chaos. But you know not what that _means_. It is not that strength is worthless in the end, for chance may set you against an enemy too strong or cunning. You are a warrior. You are strong, and you understand this well enough, now. But you – you are golden Thor. Great-hearted and generous and noble as well.”

Thor nods. “So I would like to be; so I strive to be. Sometimes I fail. But I try, and of late I have learned much.” Loki smiles. It is not a sneer, it is not condescending. It is kind, and full of a strange sympathy.

“Great-heartedness, nobility, and courage are all as worthless in the end as strength. They will betray you when you most rely on them, and it will be your downfall. The universe will make you make the choices you cannot now imagine.”

 _No, that is a lie_ , Thor thinks. He has some faith yet, though in what he cannot put into words.“Even if you speak the truth, I must still try.” This may be no hammer battle, but blind stubborn willpower is his other weapon, and he will wield it to the last against the despair that holds his brother and would yet take him.

“You speak as though it would avail you,” Loki says, turning angry. “But when you finally feel the storm flay your very _soul_ , your essence, everything you are, it will not. It will only break you _harder_ , to know what you once were, and how what you used to be would loathe you, and how you cannot and will not go back. Renounce our brotherhood.”

Thor shakes his head vehemently. “ _Never_ ,” he says. He sees the depths of Loki’s desperation now.

“If you say thus, “Loki retorts, “you should know. You wish to understand. You plead with me and protest your heartbreak over me.” He pauses. “If you had wanted to understand you would have followed me over the edge.”

Into the abyss, into certain death. “Do you count that a betrayal?” Thor asks quietly. He remembers falling towards the surface of Midgard in the glass cage, oblivion rushing up to meet him, and wonders if Loki meant him to feel what he had felt, when he let go of Gungnir. “I did not renounce you in that moment or any other, and I shall not, not while some part of you that I know remains. No matter what it may cost me. And this is a _choice_.”

Loki draws himself straight and calm and peaceful. “Well, then, my dear brother,” he says gently. “It will go the easier for you, then, I’m sure, and you shall gladly pay the price of the bond you claim, when you must bind me down to the rock with the steaming guts of my dead son and yet know me as your brother.”

“What mean you?”

Anger flares in Loki’s eyes like wildfire, but his words are soft and steady. “You will _make me watch_. As my son is torn apart by his brother. Transformed against his will. And you will pull out his innards before my eyes and _force me down_ and bind me. And when I cannot move you will set a serpent above me alone, and hang it dripping venom on my flesh, eating into it, dripping endlessly – ”

 “ _Nay_ , Loki, what madness – ”

“And it will _burn_.”

 _Burn me_ , Thor realizes, _to know what I have done_.“ _Loki_.”

 There is no scream; the scream is locked up in Loki’s eyes and throat. “Will you do this to me, whom you would name your brother?”

The taste of dread on Thor’s tongue. In his horror, in his grief at the very words Thor reaches up to Loki. As if for comfort. And the tears come, hot in his eyes. “I swear I shall not,” he whispers. “Never. Never do any of it. What nightmares are these?”

Loki bends and Thor feels the brush of his kiss on top of his head. “I am the god of Lies less because I speak them and more because I make others speak them. You _shall_ do as I said, oaths or no. And more. Someday the universe will set us against each other, and our children against each other, and we will do horrors you cannot dream. As destruction comes we will all be made traitors, and tear one another apart, and every friendship and brotherhood we cling to will be flung into the dirt. Filthy and perverted, mad and agonized. Lower than mindless beasts. You are good-hearted and noble, so you did not feel the _need_ to fall over the edge, you would not seek this knowledge, _you_ would not be forced to know this. Not as I have and as I do. But knowing or not knowing, neither will save you in the end.”

There is a hollow triumph in Loki’s eyes. Thor sees him almost as a mirror. He must have looked so, when he chained Loki and watched them muzzle him. “I tried to save you,” Loki says, the sound of his breath a whisper in the dark. “Know that, Thunderer. If you were not my brother, you could do that to me without it destroying you. You would be safe.” _No_ , Thor thinks, _not safe. I have no wish to be able to do such a thing to you without breaking. I have no wish to do that and have the will to live after._ “But can I not break your heart to break our brotherhood?” Loki asks. “It will hurt you so much less, Thor, when the end comes down on us.”

“What is the end you speak of?” The words come sore and harsh out of Thor’s throat as he tries to comprehend the words he hears. Suddenly he feels all the realms and all the paths and streams between them wrap themselves about him, so he cannot move and cannot breathe. The universe tightens itself around him like a serpent, leaving him bound and helpless and afraid. Trapped in the moments when he has no choice but to strike his brother down. “Name it for me, Loki. Name it.”

Loki shuts his eyes and shakes his head in refusal. He shudders slightly, and then controls himself. “The Twilight of the gods, no more or less, before a mindless night.”

 “I will fight it.” In his mind’s eye, he can see the serpent, and hear Loki’s cries at the lash of its venom, as loud as the shrieks of New York’s battle.

“It will overtake every realm, every particle, every thread of time and space, and sweep up everyone in its wake. It is more impossibly great and powerful and all-consuming than you can dream.” Loki settles his hands lightly on Thor’s shoulders, and laughs again. “How can you possibly think to fight?”

“ _For your sake_ , Loki, _I will fight it_.” And suddenly Loki tenses, and his hands clench tight, and Thor hears his breath catch in a sob. He can feel Loki weeping through their touch. Weeping true. It hurts Thor to hear it, but the pain is better, so much better, than the thought of putting his brother to torment. “I am sorry,” he whispers, “that I know not how to comfort you from this.”

“Nay,” Loki says, trembling. “Your words are a comfort, a strange one, in the night we are falling towards. Even in a world where that very sentiment will be turned against us.” _Us_ , Thor thinks, and he is almost glad. “An age is coming, Thor. An axe age, a sword age. A wind age, a wolf age.”

“I and all my friends of Midgard and Asgard, we will fight.”

Loki shakes his head. “In the darkness, we all of us are monsters. And darkness inescapable is coming for us. I was only the first.”

“Nay, you are no true monster” – _or so I pray_ – “but you have lingered long in darkness, and at first turned me aside when I tried to draw you out. Loki, if this is truth, fate is the monster, and I will spend the last of my strength fighting it before you or I succumb to evil.” This and nothing else will be his banner. “I am an Avenger.”

“You cannot avenge the universe. There is nothing else, nothing set aside on whose behalf to take vengeance.”

In New York, the Avengers fought to save a world gone horribly wrong. But Thor’s victory over his brother had been empty, so empty he knew it couldn’t be the end and was barely a beginning. “We can. We can unite, we can choose to work alongside each other, and we will not be torn asunder, not by any threat. We are battle-tempered. We can fight and we shall, when the threat comes.”

Loki’s eyes shine bright with the promise of some trick, some plan in motion, some knowledge. And also with the remnants of his tears. “I have named the threat,” he says softly. “You say you will fight for my sake. But will you fight _with_ me? Will you set me free, to have me at your side in the struggle?”

Thor takes a deep breath. One last lunge at despair, throwing it off. “Aye. You say all the realms are hurtling towards the destruction of everything that makes us free and good. I know not – perhaps I cannot know. But I will fight for a universe where you are my brother and free and good. If those wars are the same, then I will go to battle alongside you. Loki.” His brother – his brother in truth – stares at him, suddenly unfathomable _._ “No matter that it is impossible,” Thor continues, strong and vehement, “no matter the cost, no matter that all fate stands against me. I will not break my brotherhood and my heart. I will never set you to unbearable torment. I swear it; you have my oath, I swear. _I will avenge you on the universe_.”

The smile on Loki’s face – full of mischief and strange delight – makes Thor’s heart jolt. “The second path, then. You have fallen in my trap, as I hoped.”

“What trap now?” Thor asks, only banter in his voice. Strangely, he feels free of fear. He used never to fear his brother’s tricks, not when they were young and carefree and innocent.

“I bet on you doing this,” Loki says eagerly, “I knew I could make you. I kept faith. Faith that you yet had faith in me.” His tone is light in answer, but his eyes are intent. “I tried so hard to earn your hatred, when this all began, because I couldn’t understand. I only tried to deserve what I felt, and what I’d begun to fear. But I was always meant to know. I was always meant to be a harbinger of doom.” Thor stares.

“When I fell I was wound and spiraled down the threads of space and time, and so I learned what the whole of it was twisting up to. I saw the end of all the realms, world after world in endless glittering agony. But there were no battles as you know them, my brother. Say rather horrors. All the malignant evils at once ravaged one another and all the worlds together. Wave upon wave of the darkest secrets of the universe. The innocents turned against one another in fear, desperation, and pain. Even I have no words to speak of what I saw. When my fall ceased – I had some semblance of a plan.”

“A plan involving the Chitauri. And Midgard.”

“You have great love of that realm and its mortals. You would not be able to bear knowing what I know of its future, so I will not speak of it. But all the remnants of your friends – their descendants, and what they strove for, and what they loved – end in a helpless _whimper_. Even your dear Jane Foster, even her.” Thor shudders.

“I hardly bore seeing what _you_ did to Midgard, and hearing you threaten her,” he says. “I hardly bore knowing it was you who did it.”

Loki quirks a smile. “All the threads of time and space the Chitauri occupied twined towards Midgard in the future. I was found by them and another enemy. They and many others, I knew, would someday set upon the Earth like wolves and tear it apart – and her people would die screaming, or too broken to make a sound. So I conceived a notion; I could draw them out against Midgard sooner. Promise them promises I could break, pose as their ally, and win some freedom for myself – enough to organize their defeats before I aroused suspicion. That way Midgard would survive the onslaught of the Chitauri alone, survive to endure another battle as I began to unravel the fabric of doom little by little.”

He laughs, ending half in a cough. “One of your mortal friends told me I lacked conviction.” Loki breathes deeply, then snaps, “Of _course_ I lacked conviction. I feigned incompetence far enough to give the Avengers Initiative a chance to save their world. But I had no way to know if you would believe me when I spoke to you of the fate of all, or if you would care enough to commit to the struggle I’d started. If you would not aid me, Thor, the cause was futile and I would burn beneath the serpent in the end. So I arranged another plan as well, an alternative I could turn to if things began to fail.” He pauses and clenches his fists. “I tried to make you hate me as much as I loathed myself at the moment when I fell. I wanted to hate you, instead of myself, and let that hatred break our brotherhood and spare us some small portion of the griefs that I knew must follow, but in the end that hurt more than I’d imagined it could. I thought then that perhaps I could not get you to abandon me, and that all my plots were beyond my control, that fighting fate was hopeless. And worst of all was that you never quite ceased to love me, or believe that I might be redeemed.”

Thor stands up. Calm and certain. Suddenly he sees how afraid he had been, how weak, and how simple – not easy, but simple – it should have been. He draws Loki into a tight embrace, as of old.

For half a moment that are still, they are content, they are whole. Then Loki’s eyes flash, and Thor feels the sharp pain of fingernails digging into his shoulders. “Have I not _warned_ you not to trust to the sweetness of sentiment? A few plaintive soft-spoken words and you set aside all your questions, all your wariness? You know I would lie to you and use you for my own ends with not a trace of guilt. I have _done that_ _before_. And you yet act as though you have no cause to doubt me and my tale?”

“At least I may act as though you are my brother I embrace, and not some unknowable evil.” And Loki is his brother, and always was, so Thor holds him close, temples pulsing with relief, and flooded with hope as true as any emotion he has felt.

 Loki grins wide and fey, his every syllable a challenge. “I was never meant to weep and whine and bow to the machinations of others. I am Loki. I was not meant for fear.  I was – not fearless as you once were, unable to even comprehend a foe who could not be dispatched with strength in arms. But I _was_ without fear of loss, for what had I to lose? _Being_ Loki, quick-witted and cunning and playing my games with whatever and whoever came to hand – that was enough. But I did lose that. And I was made to be Loki sniveling and posturing and proclaiming and aggrandizing and full of self-pity.”

Thor almost draws him closer, but hesitates. Loki does not wish to be a creature in need of comfort now. Just a schemer, a brother in need of an ally. He hears his eager younger brother beneath the weariness of Loki’s words, the one who made a game of everything, the one who made Thor smile, always in delight. “So cast it off,” he whispers, “ and cast off your fear. I do love you, and regret what pain I’ve caused you, and no more want to see you chained helpless and beyond your own control than you do. You have a plan, now, and we will see it done.”

 “We shall need your Avengers,” Loki murmurs into Thor’s shoulder. “My wager rests on them, as well, you know. I tested them once. They – with you – shall suit perfectly for my designs. I’ve learned much that will be to their benefit, as they shall hear when you bring me to them.” He looks Thor in the eye, and the knowledge that he cannot possibly trust Loki half so far as that hits Thor hard. But instead of sore and wounded, he feels light and honest. He laughs in surprise at that.

“Nay. Nay, I shall speak to them, and we shall take council together, and decide who shall hear you speak, and when. And you may have the use of your tongue, but I doubt we shall allow you use of your more esoteric gifts, and we will speak here, or somewhere no less secure, and not of your choosing. Heimdall will observe and listen. The Allfather will hear of it, and Lord Fury of S.H.I.E.L.D., too.” He pauses, wondering if his brother will resist his caution, denounce his suspicion, accuse him of violating the bond of brotherhood he has just professed.

Loki smiles. “So be it,” he says. “It will be amusing to bring the two of them together. They’ll stare us all down with only two eyes between them. Though I doubt Fury gives out the story that he traded his for wisdom.”

“You . . . ” Thor’s voice trails off as he wonders. Loki seems _happy_ at this, happier than ever he seemed as a would-be conqueror. “You do not _want_ me to trust you at all, do you?”

Loki tightens his embrace. Thor can feel the affection in it, and also the dagger-sharp intensity of Loki’s thoughts. “Do _not_ mistake me for a hero, Thor. I am none, and never was or was meant to be. But neither was I meant to be a villain. Once, but once, I was made to play that part, and already I am _sick_ of it.” He stares into Thor’s eyes, daring him to look away, to deny that Loki is feral, frightening, quicksilver dangerous. “You came to understand what changed. If you can understand this – do you?”

Thor _thinks_. By Loki’s own admission, he was made to be a villain, had lost control, had despaired of what he truly was. He could not have had such brilliant mastery of the charade that he was the villain who wanted to rule the Earth as he had claimed. “I think I do,” Thor says slowly, “and I think you have lied some, about what you did before Midgard, and why. But you have also spoken truth, I think, and have lied to some purpose I will yet understand, so I forgive you that. And I think you mean me to see that much did not change, that how I used to see you was full of lies to myself.” Loki nods, serious, and Thor continues, “But on Midgard some things _were_ wrong with you, truly, and not all is as you have spoken. What will you say to that?”

“I think you understand enough for now.” Loki steps away lightly, keeping a grip on Thor’s forearm. “So bring your mortal brothers-in-arms – even bring Jane Foster if you like. Whatever I have spoken about her, she may grasp my tactics, if no one else. I am here.” _And I am free_ , Thor hears, the words behind Loki’s words inside the ward-sealed cell.

 Thor smiles, truly smiles. “You spoke of disasters that turn friends and brothers against one another. But against the threat you brought the Avengers did not divide and ruin one another. We made one another stronger. My brother – we two will yet do the same, I swear. ” Thor hefts Mjölnir over his shoulder.

“All the disasters and chance of the universe together would rend you. In full, the coming twilight would tear the Avengers asunder. And us as well.”

Thor steps back from his brother, who extends a hand to seal the oath. “It shall not. Not without a fight.”

 “Nay.” Loki flashes a quick smile. “We defy augury.”

“We are not locked into a world not of our choosing,” Thor says. For a heartbeat he is flooded again with the feeling of being trapped. “Are we?”

Loki winks. “The gates stand unguarded. Oh Thor,” he says. He spreads his arms wide, backlit by his own vibrancy. “Now you see me –”

 

 

 

 


	2. Stagnation

_Do I dare_

_Disturb the Universe?_

-  _T. S. Eliot, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock_

* * *

“Jane?”

“Hm?”

“It doesn’t end differently if you watch it again. It’s a DVD.”

Jane doesn’t take her eyes off the screen. “I know that.”

Darcy sighs. The woman may a brilliant astrophysicist, but she's too out of it to realize that functionality has completely come off the rails. And people think _Darcy’s_ a ditz (which isn’t entirely true. Most of it’s playing along. Always just playing along). This is just ridiculous. Darcy sets aside her phone; it’s time to clear things up. “Look, I know he’s your immortal heroic more-than-crush and he absolutely does pull off the cape look nicely, but has it occurred to you that maybe watching the news footage of him trying to save the world night after night isn’t exactly healthy behavior?” On the screen, Thor’s face is smudged with blood, and Darcy knows exactly what’s coming next. There’s a bit of Captain America shielding civilians, and then it’s back to Thor’s brother Loki laughing that maniac’s laugh and trying to kill him. He also manages to look fucking debonair in the cape; that’s the sort of thing Darcy notices every rerun.

She has the feeling that Jane notices something else.

“Well, I don’t think you should be talking,” Jane says. “You’ve been spending your evenings sitting on my couch watching it with me.”

“ _Or_ watching you watch it. Did you consider that possibility? Because I’ve been splitting my attention between that and stupid phone games and stuff.” Despite the physics background Jane’s not close to her bird-slinging aptitude, for one thing.

“ _Some_ of us have work to do, you lazy little undergrad.”

“I resemble that remark,” Darcy says crisply, hoping for a laugh or grin or double-take or _some_ reaction to her joke. But Jane just shushes her as the blonde newscaster starts reporting speculation about Loki’s nature, and by extension Thor’s. It’s clear the woman hasn’t even taken a basic course on Norse mythology, unlike Darcy (who signed up for one the semester after the New Mexico incident got resolved, under the assumption that it might come in handy, and boy were her instincts sharp).

“Some of us need to unwind at the end of the day, okay?” Jane says finally, when the action comes back on.

“Yeah, I’d buy that if you actually looked relaxed.” Darcy gestures at the screen, at the same images they’ve seen a couple dozen times, a motion that says _what are you trying to pull over on me_. Jane doesn’t mean to let anyone see her breaking down, not even Darcy, but there it is.“If it were really relaxing you’d be bored of it after the first few times. Tense much?”

Jane shrugs. “He just looks . . . messed up.”                   

“The guy with the deranged grin on his face who’s trying to destroy Manhattan with a rampaging alien army? _Nooo_ , couldn’t be.” Darcy rolls her eyes. “Of course he looks batshit, and that’s probably because he _is_ batshit.”

“I meant Thor,” Jane says quietly.

Ah. Exactly. Darcy messes around with her necklace, worrying it in her fingers. She has almost a window into Jane’s soul, and it seems very clear and sad, in a precarious balance between grief and denial. Darcy can sense it well enough that it’s pretty much a warning: _don’t probe into this now_. But somehow _something_ is going to have to change here. “Yeah, well. He was having a rough day. And you’re treating yourself to it over and over. Often in slow-mo.”

“I just – just wish I could talk to him about this, but –” Jane grimaces, and a look of desperate anger flashes across her face for a fraction of a second. Then she gives a groan of despair and flops back onto the couch.

It would be so easy to shift her soul, Darcy realizes. A few well-chosen words (or maybe even less, for Darcy) could make Jane hate Thor, or hate herself, or both. The idea scares her. So gently she puts her arm over Jane’s shoulder, and says, “He came unannounced, saved the world, and then disappeared off the face of the planet _. Literally_.” Darcy loves using the word, though not as much when she’s actually using it correctly, like now. “And he spent those couple of days in extreme personal danger, and as far as I know you couldn’t reach him, or be reached by him, or do anything to help. It makes sense that it upsets you.” Damn, it’s turning her into a _therapist_ , one thing Darcy never thought she was cut out for.

“I don’t – I don’t want to be _childish_ about it, it’s just he kissed me and _left_ and I _know_ things with his bridge got messed up, they told me everything I wanted to know, and I keep hitting blocks with making one myself, and now half my time is spent on stuff that doesn’t have anything to do with that and we keep getting bad readings so I’m making pretty much no progress to speak of  –” Jane takes a deep breath. “ _God_ ,” she mutters, her voice laced with tears. She isn’t quite crying. Just trying to hold it in.

“Jane?” Darcy says. 

“Yeah?”

"Want to come to Europe with me?”

“ _Huh?_ ” Jane looks at her blankly, looks at Loki on the TV, looks back.

“Oh for goodness sake,” Darcy says, and turns the damned thing off.  No more Avengers, no more Loki, no more Chitauri. The silence is blazing clear; it’s like waking up completely after a long stretch of half-waking anxiety dreams. For the first time in weeks Jane looks at Darcy and seems to actually _see_ and _hear_.

“ _You_ need a break, and _I_ am not actually a lazy little undergrad. I’m doing a proper thesis, on the interactions between governments and superheroes and other stuff. I’m not here in New York just to be your two-weeks assistant, you know, even though of course I do really like hanging out with you. Today I spoke to Captain America about my thesis project. And I’m going to _London_ , and that might be just a start. To get some material on the origins of S.H.I.E.L.D. and their approaches to the superpowered and the mundane. I’m gonna do some interviews. You could come along.”

Jane is silent for a while, digesting it. “I heard from him a couple of weeks ago, I guess,” she says finally. She sounds resigned. “Thor, I mean. He called me from Tony Stark’s phone. He wasn’t really here – it was a cross-dimensional projection or something I understand even less well than anything else. He said he couldn’t stay long enough to see me, that he was so sorry – and he _was_ , I could tell – because the link would fade too quickly once he used it, and he was still needed in Asgard. He said he trusted me to find a way.” She takes a deep, shuddering breath. “He said he loved me.”

“Damn, Jane,” Darcy says. She lays her hand on Jane’s.

“But literally the next day Dr. Banner calls me up for _another_ round of Aurora investigations, and I can’t get out of it; they need me on it, and it’s important. It’s important.” She sighs. “If I could only see the _patterns_ in it as clearly as I understood multidimensional travel when Thor explained it, I could get back to the Einstein-Rosen Bridge properly. Whether or not I ever manage to make one.”

Darcy hugs Jane tighter with the arm around her friend’s shoulder. In her mind’s eye rainbow light scatters far across the sky, almost as bright as Jane herself. “You’ll get there, Jane.”

Jane Foster smiles weakly. “We won. The Avengers beat the aliens. But something’s not okay. That damn Aurora. Maybe it’s me.”

“Maybe not just you, though. You’re always ahead of the game.”

“And Loki _freaks_ me out.”

Sensible, that attitude. “If you want to take a few days to try to get this all out of your head, at least, please come to London. You can be my thesis advisor, because I don’t have a real one yet. I’ve never been off this continent, you know, we can get really bad touristy fish and crisps – hang out without your stress strangling you or watching Earth’s mightiest heroes beat the pudding out of Thor’s little brother.”

Jane smiles. “That. That will be good.”

The charm sparks warm under Darcy’s shirt. “Of course it will.”

“ . . . You _spoke to Captain America?_ "

* * *

It started last semester in her dorm in Culver. She’d been alone, because her roommate transferred out immediately after the fuss with the Hulk (which, hearing the rumors and stories about it, seemed both oddly plausible and not a major concern. She’d seen just as weird with her own eyes, after all). Darcy, left to avoid studying in peace, never would have guessed Culver was so interesting.

Of course, once she did, she didn’t let it go at that. So sometimes late at night when she sat around eating crasins out of the bag and browsing the internet, she entertained herself by unlocking bits of the school’s website with Dr. Selvig’s passwords. _It’s not unethical. He gave 'em to me so I could check and update things; he just never asked me to stop_. That was her philosophy at the time, and it served her well, at least in terms of staving off boredom. The name of Project P.E.G.A.S.U.S. alone had her in tears of laughter the first few times she ran across it. Seriously, flying horse, Greek myth? Ooooooh, menacing.

A blue cube seemed to feature prominently in the project. It was referred to as a Tesseract, which Darcy took to indicate that either the thing was multi-dimensional or someone there was a huge fan of _A Wrinkle in Time_. Being back at school proper, Darcy didn’t see Jane very often in the flesh; post-doc sort of basically complete and Foster Theory progressing, she was rarely around Culver. Still, they managed to call or Skype at least every couple of weeks, and Darcy also had a half-completed email of amusing links for Jane working most of the time. But somehow she avoided mentioning Dr. Selvig’s new, super secret project, even though the site had a bunch of sketches and notes about things that might interest Jane; every time she was about to bring it up she changed the topic at the last moment. She didn’t know exactly how Jane felt about S.H.I.E.L.D. after the highly mixed messages at Puente Antiguo, and anyway Jane would probably get mad about her doing this without permission and tell someone, and that would be the end of that. More than that, she'd rather make Jane laugh than upset at her any day of the week.

Besides, even without trying to understand the physics most of the time, it was kinda cool. The site, while sparse on super-classified details like _exactly_ where P.E.G.A.S.U.S. was based, had pretty juicy bits of information, like that the cube had been used by Captain America (to her amazement; wasn’t he just in the comics?) and some Nazi bastard from World War II, or maybe not. The extensive notes on the thing (ninety percent of which appeared to be there to fill out what she thought must be a mandatory obtuse content quota) mentioned that it might be useable in weaponry. Or as a doorway to another world – another great reason to tell Jane, but if it had any relevance to her work, wouldn’t Dr. Selvig have told her anyway? They also referenced Tony Stark’s arc reactor, and emphasized, at great length, the possibility that the blue cube thing could rival or even surpass it in energy generation. 

_Silly_ , she thought, _to want something so much just because Tony Stark might have it up his sleeve. What could you possibly want that for that you’d go to all this trouble?_ She understood that cheap clean power was appealing (understatement of the century), but she had to shake her head. It was all so very secretive, all cloak-and-dagger. After the mess S.H.I.E.L.D. had made of things last spring Darcy wasn’t so surprised at that. They could make a big fuss about subterfuge and counter-espionage, but they didn’t really know what the hell they were doing most of the time. Hah. Like anyone knew how to deal with superheroes and villains and gods. Except Darcy. The answer was break out the taser and introduce them to the wonders of coffee. Right?

One night, months after she’d first done it and weeks since she last had, she went to log onto Dr. Selvig’s account and couldn’t get in. She tried another couple of times and got locked out of the site for her troubles. The passwords had been changed. She didn’t think anything of it, except that old cloak-and-dagger S.H.I.E.L.D. must’ve sharpened up some, and she left it at that. Completely let it slip out of her mind.

Until Loki happened.

Darcy watched numbly as panic spread and people died. The university got put on lockdown, but she barely noticed; she couldn’t tear herself away from the crisis. She called Jane over and over, but there was no answer. She didn’t sleep, too afraid that terrible things were being done to Jane, too afraid that she’d miss seeing some fresh new horror as it happened. Off the feed of some benighted high schooler in Manhattan she watched hordes of aliens storm New York, like it was a sick B-movie. She watched the carnage, and in a moment of disbelief she saw the rumors break that someone had launched a nuclear missile at New York; the panic, the grief, the despair as it rippled across the world. Through the poor guy’s webcam she watched Tony Stark fall from the sky.

All over some glowing blue cube buried deep in the bowels of a S.H.I.E.L.D. facility, that Loki used to hack into the mind of one of its own agents, and Erik Selvig’s, and who knew who else’s. Just a blue cube that could provide energy for everyone forever, if they could only make it tick. Something maniacs and aliens and gods would kill for without a second thought. Something no one on Earth knew about who wasn’t in on it and sworn to secrecy.

Except Darcy Lewis.

The night it was over she went up to her dorm building roof and cried and cried and cried. She cried because people had been killed, she cried because the world was in flames, she cried because of what happened in Germany. She cried for Jane, and Thor, and the guy whose webcam she’d watched the world crumble through. She cried over the stupid stupid blue cube Tesseract _thing_. She cried because she’d known about it and she hadn’t done anything to stop it. She cried because she hadn’t even thought, but she should have known, she should have seen how dangerous it all was but she’d chosen to be blind. She cried until she felt stupid, until she could hardly breathe. She just sobbed uselessly even though the world was going to make it, probably. No thanks to her.

“What do I even do now?” she mumbled to herself. The cool wet air brushed her face, her tears, the snot she’d wiped on the sleeve of her jacket. She was alone, for all the people at Culver, for all the people in the world and their hearts still beating, beating across the miles that stretched out below. It was probably better for all the superheroes. The Avengers, the saviors. Darcy didn’t kid herself, that whole business was stress and trauma. But they were in it together, and they were saving the world, they were doing something about it. Doing everything in their power. Whatever it might cost them.

And Darcy might’ve had even more power than all of them combined. Enough to avert the disaster. Enough to save everyone from themselves.

“Help,” she whispered. The world was silent back at her. She was so small; what she felt wasn’t going to influence shit. It made her angry. “Help, you bastards,” she said, “there are things out there I don’t understand and they’re more powerful than me, and who even has a chance, _so what do you care_.”

“You called, Darcy Lewis?” a hoarse voice said.

She whirled around, startled, like she’d been caught out. “Don’t you _dare_ come up here,” she choked out angrily, “I have a taser and I’m not afraid to use it.” But there was no one at the roof door.  And no one knew who she was, or why she was so upset, or what she had screwed up so massively. There were only the sounds of her ragged breathing and the heavy murmur of wings beating in the night.

“No, you aren’t,” said the voice.

There was a whoosh of wind as a bird – a huge freaking bird – flapped down heavily. It was big and black and majestic. _Oh, it’s just a bird_ , Darcy thought, regarding it dully, until she realized how fast it was, _much_ faster than she’d thought it could be at its size. Her reflexes were so sluggish she hardly thought to duck as it came down at her. Or scream. She must’ve thrust out her arms to protect her face because it caught her by her right forearm as it came in, nearly spilling her to the ground. But somehow she kept herself standing, even as the bird’s talons dug into the material of her jacket and held tight. She stared at it, and it stared at her.

It was a raven.

“What the _hell_?” she said. Her voice was shaky; her whole body was trembling. Her muscles strained against the raven's weight.

“You asked for help, Darcy Lewis.”

“ _What_ – this – _what_.” She took a deep breath, but the bird just sat there.  “How do you know my name?”

“You know,” the raven said, after a pause, “how I know your name. It is my business to know things.”

“No I don’t,” Darcy said. But she did. It wasn’t any bird. It was a raven. It was a messenger. Last night a trickster god had tried to steal the world, the worst night of her life. And tonight Odin’s Thought or Memory was visiting her.

“You asked for help, Darcy Lewis.”

“Uh. Yeah.”

“I might be able answer that.” The raven’s beady black eye glittered in the half-light, full of knowledge.

Darcy shivered. She opened her mouth to say _I don’t trust any of this_ , but stopped. The last thing she wanted was to piss off Odin.  She’d seen what Thor could do. The whole world had seen what _Loki_ could do. Suddenly she remembered nearly dying on the street in Puente Antiguo in every vivid detail, the heat, the fear, the raw noise against her throat. She didn’t want to die. She didn’t want anyone else to die. She didn’t want any more myths or legends come to life. She wanted the world to be normal again. But it was far too late for that. “What’s your answer, then?” she asked.

“I have a favor to ask of you, on behalf of my lord,” the bird said. “But only if you agree to it willingly.”

“I thought you said you would _help_. There are people dead.” _And it's partly my fault_. “What about _that_?”

“You asked for help. By agreeing to this favor, you would help my master, and be empowered, perhaps, to help others as well. That is my answer.”

“Your master . . . is Odin,” Darcy said.

“True,” said the raven.

“What sort of help can Odin get from me? I’m a human. I’m pretty mortal and powerless and I’m not super intelligent or anything like that. From what I’ve been seeing with Thor and Loki here, Odin has got to be pretty powerful. And if you know my name, I’m sure you and Odin know all this already.”

“My lord came to hold a valuable treasure. He seeks someone to secure it.”

Darcy thought of the Tesseract and nearly threw up all over the bird. _Valuable treasure_. “Why can’t he hold it himself?”

“Our lord does not own it as such. It belongs to an independent agent.”

“You – you’d better – please don’t be asking me to keep some stolen artifact. I’m can’t keep it from the rightful owner, I won’t, ask someone else for that.” Maybe Odin or his agents would do something nasty to her for saying something that sounded like a refusal, or an accusation that he was a thief – but she couldn’t. “And anyway I’m not – I’m no hero, you know I have no powers, I’m not like Captain America or Iron Man or the Hulk or anyone like that. I don’t have the power to secure _anything_.” She didn’t even have the courage to do the right thing about the Tesseract before it was too late.

The bird cocked its head, amused, or maybe just irritated. “My lord holds it in trust, but it can no longer remain with him; it is in too vulnerable a position. It is _not_ stolen. And it is _you_ I have been sent to ask, and no other.”

_“_ Why me?” Darcy said.

The bird paused. Its wingtips fluttered slightly, as if for the first time it had to consider how best to answer her. Finally it replied, “It is your fate, Darcy Lewis.”

Darcy breathed out, a long shuddery sound. She was done with crying. “Well. I don’t know,” she said. “I don’t believe that, I guess. Maybe Thor has a fate. Jane probably has a fate too. Iron Man and Captain America maybe, I don’t know, don’t ask me. But I’m pretty normal. I definitely don’t have a fate.” _I had a choice, I had a chance, and I screwed it up completely on my own, thank you very bloody much._

“Exactly. _You_ are an independent agent yourself.” The talons squeezed a little more sharply than before. “You do not answer to Asgard’s rule, nor to any of her enemies. Nor will you bend to the powers of Midgard. Odin Allfather knows you, Darcy Lewis.”

She hoped he didn’t. The idea of being known at all made her want to run and hide, it opened up the pit in her stomach, made her feel the way she’d felt when she thought someone had found her crying on the rooftop. The idea of anyone _knowing_ made her tense; every stupid thing she thought and every secret lazy selfish feeling she had, how boring and weak and _cowardly_ she was, she wanted it all hidden safe inside. Some things _had_ to be hers and hers alone. Her memories and choices.

But being afraid of what Odin knew or didn’t know wasn’t going to change anything, and damned if she was going to change how she acted because of some Norse deity she’d never even met. So Darcy gritted her teeth and said, “Fine. I’m game. What’s this treasure?”

“Watch and see,” said the raven. Suddenly it began to croak and retch; its claws dug deeper into Darcy’s arm. It looked almost like a mother bird regurgitating to feed its young. But less sweet and more obscene. With a shudder it brought up a lump and spat it into Darcy’s palm. It was a little slimy; the raven was a real enough raven. It felt all warm and feathery on the outside, and was full of blood and guts and stomach juice on the inside.

“You’re giving me a . . . necklace?” Darcy asked. Underneath the slick was a gem on a silvery chain, large enough that Darcy would place it as costume jewelry if she saw it on anyone but real live European royalty. She rubbed it off on her other sleeve and lifted it above her, where its facets caught the faint misty light from below. It was clear – bright and greenish. “ _Loki_?” she said. Something in the color brought to mind his verdant finery, but then his spear’s energy had been violently blue, like the Tesseract; even his eyes, in the photos being shared and cleaned up online by the thousands now that the cats were out of the bag . . .

She closed her palm around it, then opened it again. Nothing seemed to happen; there was no spark or glow. But Darcy _felt_ ; she felt all the things she’d ever felt and more. She felt lonely and she felt wanted, she felt loved and she felt powerful and she felt worthless. And at the same time she _saw_ herself feeling, as if from afar, as if the green gem were a telescope and she stood removed.

“What is it?” she asked the raven in a quiet voice.

“It’s a soul stone. An artifact of great power, as I said.”

She clasped the gem to her chest and turned her thoughts to the bird. It was all bent to its duties, inside and out; it barely had a self of its own – and yet underneath the obedience to Odin there was a fear, or a regret. There was another raven. Darcy knew all this in the time it took her to draw a breath.

“Who _is_ the owner?”

“That,” said the raven, “is not for me to say.”

“Okay. Fine. But I’m not giving it back to you.” The raven started. Darcy smiled; she’d surprised it; she could keep it off balance. “Like I said, I won’t keep it from the rightful owner. I’ll return it to whoever it is as soon as I’m asked. But I’m not going to be a safe deposit box for something that doesn’t even belong to Odin, so he can take it to use whenever he likes and then just dump it back on me when he’s done. I’ll make the decisions.”

“As you say,” said the raven, its bearing turned back into stoic unfathomability. It began to worry almost absentmindedly at some feathers with its huge beak. “But don’t tell anyone.”

“Huh?”

“Not an order, Darcy Lewis. Merely advice. Trust yourself, keep it secret; when you speak, more ears than you know may be listening.”

“Well – thanks,” said Darcy. “I guess.” She looked at the stone for a moment, then slipped the chain over her head and the gem inside her shirt. She barely felt it there; it was exactly the temperature of her skin. When she was done, the raven settled its wings.

“My task here is complete; but many more remain,” it said. “Farewell, then, Darcy Lewis.”

“Wait!” Darcy said. “Come on, that’s it? Quoth me some nevermore or something before you just _leave_!”

“Huh?” said the raven, dumb Viking bird-brain that it was. It didn’t even get it. Its wings began lifting and churning air.

She didn’t want it to go. It was surreal; it was almost a dream. In the morning, she was sure the disasters would still be real. It was too small a comfort to know that Loki actually trying to conquer the world meant that she probably actually _was_ just given a mysterious piece of jewelry by a talking raven. “Where’s the other one?” she asked. “There are two of you, right, Odin has two ravens? Which one are you, Huginn or Muninn?”

But the raven was gone and her words were lost in the night.

 

* * *

In the morning Darcy went down to the dorm’s lounge, cleaned up and steady. Everyone was watching the news and chatting and decompressing, and, even though it was ten in the morning, drinking beer. She was wearing the soul stone, because she had no idea what better thing to do with it. She kept messing around with it, like it was some sort of stress toy, catching glimpses of the souls around her.

_Do you see them?_ It seemed to say. _Do you hear the ones trying to help their friends who lost loved ones in New York, do you hear the sorrow? Do you hear the relief?_

Yeah, Darcy wanted to tell it, now leave me alone for a bit so I can work on dealing. There were so many people around her. So many feelings and desires and fears. And so much power, ebbing and flowing. It was scary. If you knew too much how all the other people were all just as real and conscious and human as you. But screw that, screw being scared. She’d asked for help to deal with her mistakes. And if this was what she had, she’d figure out how to make it work.

It was still pretty damn weird, though. Plus she wasn’t completely certain it wouldn’t explode. She hoped very very hard that if it did no one else got hurt. _Don’t tell anyone_. But Darcy had never been one to listen to sense.

Late in the afternoon they broadcasted a short update, with all the Avengers and Loki. Somehow Thor was taking him back to where they came from. And the Tesseract, too. Thus endeth another round of bad shit, reasoned Darcy, with Thor shepherding everything off to Asgard, the universe’s unofficial Mysterious Artifact and Affected Villain dump. God bless Thor, if that even made any sense.

Her phone rang.

“Jane? _Jane!_ Oh thank god you’re all right, I was so worried I –”

“I didn’t even know you’d been calling me until a few minutes ago,” Jane said, “I’m so sorry, I couldn’t call, I was – a secure location, okay, I’m fine, are you all right?”

“Yeah, Culver is well clear of New York, I’m fine. Did they – was it because it was _Loki_ that you –“

“I can’t talk long, I’m sorry, I’ll be in touch.”

Darcy spluttered. She wanted to tell Jane about the thing; Jane would listen to her about weird Norse gods and their whims. “But –”

“I’m sorry, I would say if I could but I can’t. Stay safe, Darce. Bye.”

Darcy shook her head, sighed, and started to plan it all out in her head.

* * *

She spent her waking hours trying to read up on the Tesseract with the help of the internet. The superhero community had exploded overnight, now that there was more to do than speculate about the Hulk and fangasm over Iron Man. Her sleeping hours and would-be sleeping hours were devoted to figuring out the soul stone (there, by the highly questionable grace of a god, went the rest of spring semester). She wore it everywhere, because leaving it unattended would be the high of stupidity. The only issue was that it talked back to her. Every time she tried to just pay attention in class, it would draw her attention somewhere else. _Look at that guy, look at the look on his face, like he’s not thinking anything, but really his whole being is focusing on how much he hates himself_. _Look at her – if you offered her the chance to do something that would change the world, she would give you anything for it. Anything._

“Can it or I’ll toss you in the lake,” Darcy growled, probably five times a day, starting to sympathize with every good guy from _The Lord of the Rings_. It was, to say the least, unnerving. And upsetting. But she learned to tune it out, slowly, because the raven wasn't coming back and wasn't getting it even if it did. She got it to the point where she'd only touch on people’s souls if she concentrated, if she really wanted to. At least she managed to keep herself from drowning in the strange color-saturated world of empathy. _Seeing_ people gave her the creeps and made her feel like a dirtier spy than anything. Souls were more private than bodies by a long shot, and more complicated than the rest of the world put together. None of it made her nerves calm down; none of it made her feel any more in control.

When the semester ended Darcy went back for a couple of months to help Jane out, mostly in and around New York. She didn't mention Odin's raven or the soul stone, and Jane didn't mention where she'd been during the Invasion. Darcy brought her coffee and lame jokes while Jane collected data on the blue light pulses people had started seeing in the skies in the northeast. Darcy tried to ask about S.H.I.E.L.D. and the Tesseract and got tight-lipped non-answers for her troubles; very unlike Jane. But then Darcy wasn't even being allowed in Avengers Tower, where Jane discussed her projects with Agency representatives and Bruce Banner, alias the incredible god-bashing Hulk. Too much classified information. They held a legal hearing in New York around that time; Assistant Director Maria Hill of S.H.I.E.L.D. was brought in to testify, and they all spent a lot of time talking about whether the Avengers should have been formed ( _assembled_ , in the phrase of newscasters who had, in Darcy’s impeccable opinion, an unhealthy penchant for assonance). Back and forth, talking about Nick Fury’s initiative. All the public opinion was on the side of the heroes; all the outrage was directed at whoever might have been against their recruitment.

No one even asked whether the Tesseract should have been messed with.

For that matter, no one even knew if S.H.I.E.L.D. or anyone else didn’t have more dangerous supervillain-bait tech than they were letting on; and they still weren’t being clear about P.E.G.A.S.U.S’s existence. And no one talked about who controlled S.H.I.E.L.D. It wasn’t the UN as far as Darcy could tell, and it wasn’t the U.S. government. Maybe Nick Fury just answered to himself? But did anyone regulate the decisions? Could they even be influenced? Darcy started making notes and emailing some of her old poli-sci professors. When the new semester started she barged in on their office hours, getting agitated and generally not being taken very seriously. She ended up writing an essay on the blasted thing, with a sustained conclusion arguing for the creation of an independent oversight commission and a public database, and shoving it in the face of the guy who ran the Political Theory course.

“I seriously can’t believe that no one thinks this is even an issue!” she said, or possibly shouted. When he told her that while she was obviously trying very hard and interested in the topic she should try something with more _available material for analysis_ , and didn’t seem to hear a word when she got agitated and told him that the whole _problem_ was that no one knew what documents there even _were_ , she thought _I’ve had enough_ and pulled out the soul stone and made him _look_. She wanted him to _see_ how it felt when she’d realized what the Tesseract could actually _do_ , and how scared she’d been knowing that she hadn’t even considered saying anything, and now she was even more scared that everyone was like that, always, and no one would _step up to the freaking plate._ She grabbed him by the soul, that pedantic tenured authoritative grandchild-loving indescribable heart, and _showed him_.

“So what are we going to _do_?” she asked when she was done. The professor was collapsed in his chair, looking a little bewildered, and Darcy realized a couple of things. Firstly, she could probably make him feel her _want_ enough to make him do whatever she liked. And that was freaky and probably super dangerous and _bad bad bad_. And two, yes, no one really  _was_ thinking about the Tesseract as anything other than something Loki had used to portal Chitauri in; no one was sure that he got to Earth _through_ it, or that humans could have had anything to do with how it used by Loki, because everyone thought about that sort of power as being fundamentally alien and unknown and uncontrollable. Unlike the Avengers, who were at least dubiously human. But S.H.I.E.L.D. – as far as she could tell, S.H.I.E.L.D. was trying to control both, and everyone else was passively letting things happen. Because they were thinking the way she had: she didn’t know enough or have enough authority to decide what was the right course of action on her own, did she? Maybe if she’d believed other people had known about the Tesseract she wouldn’t have been, well, in effect, such a coward. Maybe.

One night after she’d worked the idea into the ground, she brought up the cached webpage for the livestreamed apocalypse and combed through the chat for intelligent comments. Out of four thousand viewers, she found twenty people whose thoughts were worth her attention. She took the time to write up a nice, sane email and send it to all of them, along with her essay. Then she collapsed on her desk, asleep.

She dreamed about Manhattan, vivid as if she were there. But the superheroes were all dead.

Half-waking, she took the soul stone in her hand. What would have happened? A massacre across the globe, probably. Too many defiant people, like in Suttgart; Loki would have enjoyed mowing them down. Some would’ve joined more covert resistance groups. Darcy . . . would’ve tried to find Jane, probably. She hoped so. Poor Jane, Loki wouldn’t let her go easily, he’d leer at her and tap her with that spear of his and turn her eyes blue and  _enjoy it_ . . .

“I’m so sorry, Jane,” she said.

The Tower in the bombed-out city, that would be Loki’s Manhattan palace, where the blue Aurora lit up the night. Seven billion people, kneeling or dying. If she tried to free Jane with the soul stone - 

She held the green gem out in front of her and concentrated with all her strength, all her hopes for Jane's discoveries and joys, and tried to reach down and find her indomitable unbendable will to keep searching -

But it was only a dream, only Darcy behind Jane and Loki and the dead Avengers and everyone. Darcy alone, dying or kneeling.

She woke up, her mouth tasting sour. In her bleery eyes, her email beamed brightly. **So you asked what I think about SHIELD and stuff and I hope you don't regret fishing your wish** , said the one at the top.

That was how she met Ian and got him in on it.

He was British, for a start, and he was her age and majoring in Communications. And pre-Law. And Computer Science. That would’ve scared Darcy, but he was actually impressed with poli sci and what she was doing with it. Over the course of some late-night rapid-fire messaging brainstorming conversations things started making sense. Neither of them was a superhero or had access to any power like that ( _well._ . . . Darcy thought she’d wait to mention being in possession of pure bottled empathy magic). But they wanted a say in how the people who saved the world were treated, and treated them, and what sort of risks should be taken with supernatural-level technology and secrets. And pretty much everyone else did too, but they were too overwhelmed by villains and aliens and, heck, even the superheroes themselves, to make sense of it all. The one site that even considered it was pathetic: it consisted only of a handful of really old clips of Iron Man and the Hulk, bolstered by a paranoid tagline. Ian showed it to her and all she could do was laugh, a bit sickly. There was plenty of material to work with, plenty of directions to go. Enough for a thesis for both of them, for starters.

Ian told her straight off, he’d wondered as soon as the Loki-Chitauri stuff blew over, he was wondering how it was going to work. He’d done a class presentation a year back about Iron Man’s self-branding and independence, but with the Avengers, things were changing. Rapidly.

“They saved the world, they saved us all, but the thing is, Loki attacked us as _humans_. He projected that message loud and clear, that we were inferior, stupid, sheep, he made a big show of it. But we’re not, that’s the whole point, why say that if we’re not a threat, why claim that there’s glory subjugating us if we’re chattel? Because we keep inventing and searching, here we just _defeated a god_ and aliens when two days before we didn’t know that we weren’t alone in the universe. What are we going to do next, where are we going? I don’t know. I’m excited to find out.”

“It comes down to the Tesseract,” Darcy wrote back. “It’s Pandora’s box, and we opened it up. We’re stuck in the future now, whether we like it or not.”

“I don’t know,” Ian replied. “I’ve always thought that opening Pandora’s box was the right thing. The necessary thing. The human thing. If there’s a big red button and a sign telling you not to press it – you have to, right? Maybe Thor’s people can drop that thing on Earth somewhere and just forget about it, but we can’t help touching it, trying to pull it apart and put it back together. But S.H.I.E.L.D. hoarded all the knowledge of the Tesseract so they could make all the decisions about how to use it without anyone challenging them. Same with the Avengers.”

People needed information and agency. Knowledge was power. So they redoubled research efforts between them, pooling resources. One lucky thing Ian found was that S.H.I.E.L.D. had sprung from an older semi-secret organization called the Strategic Scientific Reserve – _and_ that there were some obscure but publicly accessible documents to do with that available in London. Darcy had Culver, not that she’d been able to find anything more than the barest shred of outright, tangible evidence that they had anything to do with S.H.I.E.L.D. at all.

Most of the stuff that wasn’t classified was bland, uninformative, and probably riddled with misinformation if not outright lies. But it was clear that the SSR was an agency formed by England and America around the time of World War II in response to Hitler’s HYDRA special weapons division, and that it produced Captain America.

After a bit of work, Ian’s hacking skills paid off with some juicy pieces of information skimmed from Culver’s website. “It’s nothing,” he wrote in an email sent around 6 a.m. his time, “their security is surprisingly mediocre, for a place that’s apparently S.H.I.E.L.D.’s front or something. I expect S.H.I.E.L.D. itself is better, but here we are.”

“You’re being pretty modest about some not-so-modest HAXXOR SKILLZ, bro,” Darcy sent back, grinning like a devil.

There were lab reports on an experiment that, Darcy and Ian realized after some close reading, related to Bruce Banner and the Hulk and in turn those files referenced a so-called ‘super-serum’ and Captain America. So, S.H.I.E.L.D. and its progenitors had been working with weaponizable personnel since the beginning. Plus there were some low-res photos of what Darcy recognized as the huge suit of armor that had attacked Thor in New Mexico. Now in possession of S.H.I.E.L.D.  She guessed she’d expected they would clean it up, but proof that they kept it and were secretly trying to reverse-engineer it? “Man, I don’t like any of this,” she wrote. “It gives me the creeps.”

“So,” Ian replied, “how are we going to change the way things are done around here?”

They spent the next few weeks multitasking. They went from daily emails to IMing for hours at a time on end to playing HALO online while discussing the project almost all night, every night. Even during the two-week blink-and-you-miss-it Mandarin terrorism, they just kept piling new ideas on.

“It’s gotta be super-public. Super transparent. People have to trust this,” Darcy said.

“So we’ll be public,” Ian replied in his faultless British accent. “We’ll have our full names up and everything. Email, too. Whatever.”

Darcy shook her head, not that he could see her or anything. “We’re gonna lose this round, man, but whatever. Thing is, you want to get swamped? Sorting through all the spam is going to be a nightmare, and we don’t have a project secretary or anything. Hell, I’ve _been_ project-secretary-and-coffee-girl once. It ain’t always pretty.”

“We’re going to be big enough to _get_ swamped?”

“Dream big, my friend, or go home.”

“Hey, Darce, I _am_ home. I am literally in point of fact playing videogames in my parents’ basement. If we’re going to get it out to enough people, if we’re really going to have an impact on stuff –”

“Yeah?”

“We’re gonna have to have funding. And publicity. And we are currently, if you’ll pardon the expression, two nobodies.”

“Pardon not granted, sir. Besides, can’t we just do like a Kickstarter?”

“Wow,” Ian said. “You’re _nuts_. And brilliant. I like the way you think.”

“Don’t make me blush,” said Darcy. “And hey, if we’re going to do something like that I really _should_ come to London, okay? We can’t start this split by the Atlantic. It was already ridiculous thinking we could do a Wikileaks thing _and_ organize an oversight committee _and_ set up a liaison system for superheroes and scientists and everything without that to deal with, too. I’m coming to visit. _Somehow_.”

“AWESOME,” said Ian. “But first, if we want a good campaign, we should get a good endorsement. A really good one. Something to get people to take us _seriously_.”

* * *

Steve Rogers – Captain Steve Rogers – was still trying to figure out why they hadn’t involved him with the Mandarin, and what in the world the idea with the Iron Patriot was, when he heard a bit of Mozart. _Oh_ , he thought, _someone is trying to call me_. On the cell-phone. He never should have let them give him the cell-phone.

“Sir,” said the voice.

“Steve Rogers speaking. Who is this?” He had a feeling he should know, not because he recognized the voice from anywhere – but because in 2012, 2013 now, everyone seemed to know everything all the time, thanks to cell-phones.

“S.H.I.E.L.D. offices, Captain Rogers. I have a young woman in my office who wants to talk to you, and is wondering if she can make an appointment. Is there a time you might be available?”

When _wasn’t_ he available? It wasn’t wartime (well, actually it was. In Afghanistan and other countries nearby on the globe, apparently. But no one seemed to know or care, certainly not half as much as they cared about the Avengers). He wasn’t in the field. He wasn’t giving performances, or making speeches, or anything. Even his friends, after the Battle of Manhattan, were doing somewhat useful things. Bruce was researching the Aurora and Tony, only recently back from dealing with the Mandarin’s terrorism, was tinkering and inventing things. Natasha Romanoff and Clint Barton were running espionage missions with S.H.I.E.L.D., tracking down left-behind Chitauri technology, as far as he knew. And Thor was, well, he wasn’t sure, but Steve figured that if they still got lightning during a thunderstorm and neither Loki nor the Tesseract had come back from where Thor had taken them, things were right with him. There was that one night Thor sort of visited and asked if they’d let him talk to Loki, but other than what Tony described as “probably a projection based on residual Tesseract energy between here and there”  and Steve thought of as kind of a bluish ghost they hadn’t seen him since last summer.

That left Steve, who was spending his days trying to understand the future. Not getting that far doing it. Still a man out of time. Bruce would visit him to “hang out”, and Tony joined them the weeks he was in New York – they ate popcorn and watched movies and explained the references to him. You could rent or buy and play movies on your television, in perfect color, whenever you liked. You could, even more impossibly, “stream” them using a computer, which everyone had in their houses, so you could decide you wanted to see pretty much any movie ever and start watching two minutes later. They answered his questions about technology – Tony had given him the cell-phone, made by his own company (Tony was so much like his father it almost scared Steve – those men thought they could make _anything_ , and sometimes they did).And Bruce had patiently explained to him how to use it, and had done something to it so he could just turn it on, say a person’s name to it, and it would call them. It seemed practically magic, even to Steve, who thought he’d seen it all. Bruce and Tony were good friends.

But there was no one to really talk to. No Bucky. Or Peggy. The problem was he needed to talk to them about the war and about living in the future, but he also needed to talk _about_ them – about losing the chance to be with them half a year ago, but having to live in a world where they had gone on to he knew not what. Bucky was listed as M.I.A., but whatever convinced S.H.I.E.L.D. that he could possibly still be alive wasn’t in his file. Peggy was in her nineties now. And he was back to being too shy to ask her to dance. How could he ever apologize for being so late?

So he wasn’t really doing anything important at all, and the team they’d brought together when the world was on the line had loosened into stagnation now that there was no immediate threat, or, at least, none that they’d been made aware of.

He told the S.H.I.E.L.D. agent that the young woman – her name, it turned out, was Darcy Lewis – could meet him at the café near the Avengers Tower at 12:30 on Thursday, and no, he didn’t want a security detail. _If there was one thing the super-serum should have been good for_ , he thought. He didn’t bother to ask why she wanted to see him. Maybe she was a fan of his. That would be fine. The walls of his room in the Tower were plastered all over with letters and drawings from kids from around the world, praising and thanking Captain America; he figured he ought to appreciate them, because they’d all have their own battles to fight, and on the home front or in the field – if there was a difference anymore – heroes were needed.

She probably wasn’t planning to interview him; otherwise S.H.I.E.L.D. wouldn’t have helped set up the meeting in the first place. Maria Hill had debriefed all the Avengers after New York and expressly forbade making public statements or giving information to the press. She claimed that, among other things, there was a risk that what they said might be used in court of law against them or S.H.I.E.L.D., or be used by enemies (whom she didn’t name). None of them did talk to the press about New York or S.H.I.E.L.D., except Tony Stark a few times. He, again like his father, was the sort to do things just because they were forbidden, or thought impossible. But Tony was worn out, in his heart, about New York, and the bomb, and his journey into space; Steve could see that. Heroism came at a cost even for someone who pretended he wasn’t interested in teamwork and self-sacrifice. It always did, no matter who you were. So Tony didn’t end up saying much about New York anyway.

Steve Rogers wondered what S.H.I.E.L.D. would try to do to them if they tried. A group that successfully defeated a rogue so-called god (with a little “g”, it made as much sense as any other way of putting it) and his alien army, when no one else could – could S.H.I.E.L.D. really enforce their demands? Maybe it didn’t matter.

He was at the café by noon, dressed casually. Some people recognized him and pointed, but mostly they didn’t stare or intrude as he drank his coffee. Only a few very young children, who tended to shout “It’s Captain America! _It’s Captain America!_ ” until they were shushed by a parent; anyway, he wouldn’t have scheduled a meeting in public if he didn’t want to risk the attention; not when the Tower was perfectly handy. And aside from a couple of people who wanted his signature on a napkin – which he gave with a smile, because it was the easiest and nicest thing to do – no one approached him before young woman bundled in a maroon coat and knitted hat, carrying a mug of her own, did.

“Um. Captain Steve Rogers?” she said politely. “I’m – my name is Darcy Lewis, the one who scheduled to see you, can I sit down?”

“Of course you may.” She shrugged off the coat and set down her coffee.

“Thank you so much for your time, sir.”

“Please call me Steve,” he said.

She smiled shyly.  “Are you sure?”

“Yes I am,” he said. “So, Miss Lewis –”

“Just Darcy,” she said, raising both hands in the air. “Please!”

“But, miss, as a lady –”

“As a captain, sir, I –”

He began to laugh, and so did she, so they were both warm and smiling. It was a relief to know that he could communicate with normal people in 2013. “Very well, Darcy,” he said. “Tell me why you wanted to talk to me, then?”

So she set to talking. She explained about her studies at college, and her joint project, and the research she and her friend in England were doing about the origins of S.H.I.E.L.D. Finally she said, “So, well, Captain, uh, _Steve_ , we were thinking – that there should be a group that works as a sort of liaison between S.H.I.E.L.D. and the world, and also sort of between heroes, well, _superheroes_ like you and the Avengers, and everyone else. It’s not necessarily that too many things are secret. S.H.I.E.L.D. is in possession of very sensitive information and technology, presumably. But the rest of the world has no idea what goes into making decisions about S.H.I.E.L.D., and whether those decisions are dangerous. Like – like the Tesseract.”

“The Tesseract.” Steve said heavily. “I don’t know why they thought that was a good idea. Maybe I’m wrong, but I’d only ever seen it in the hands of, well, enemy agents, I guess.”

“HYDRA?” Darcy asked.

“Yeah. I didn’t think much information about them had been declassified.”

“Not much,” Darcy replied, glancing sideways.

“To me it was barely a few weeks before New York was attacked that I saw the Tesseract in HYDRA's hands. He was – he intended to use its power to destroy the biggest cities in the world. I don’t know if Director Fury made the choices that lead to Loki coming to Earth or not. But it scared me.”

“So even you don’t know,” Darcy said thoughtfully. “Who wanted to use it, and how they were using it, and whether they knew what doing what they were doing could cause . . .”

She didn’t know the half of it. She didn’t know that they were trying to engineer weapons with the Tesseract, or about the old HYDRA materiel, or anything. And he wasn’t allowed to say anything about it. He felt a little sick, an unfamiliar feeling since the serum. “All I knew was that I had to try to stop him. Loki, that is.”

“Yeah.”

“I’m not sure if I’m even allowed to tell you what I just said.”

“Well, I’m not recording us, and I won’t tell anyone, if you’re worried.”

“I’m fine. Just –” He wondered, for a second, what would have happened if they had fished him from the ocean years before, and only recovered the Tesseract in 2012. “I wish I had the answers.”

“You know that some people tried to sue the Avengers for the damage to New York?” Darcy laughed a little, sadly. Her coffee was nearly gone. “Or the testimony at the U.N. about the Avenger Initiative? I read a transcript . . .”

“I don’t know what the world’s come to.”

“People are scared, like I said. The Avengers – you all are good people, as far as I can see, and most people are too, really. But if anyone feels like they’re being controlled, and don’t understand what’s happening, a lot of other people could get hurt.” _No one likes to feel bullied_ , Steve thought darkly. “Ian and I want to stop that before it can start. We’re planning to turn our thesis project into something real. We want to make a publicly accessible database of declassified information about S.H.I.E.L.D. Not who their agents are, or private information about the Avengers, but past projects, and current goals, where applicable. We also want to help set up an independent review panel, people who don’t answer to S.H.I.E.L.D. and can review proposed projects and decisions, and publicize things that don’t need to be classified. And we also want to set up a confidential service for superheroes and S.H.I.E.L.D. agents to find liaisons and lawyers who can appropriately represent them to S.H.I.E.L.D. and the public.”

Steve sat back. For a moment she reminded him of Peggy. A girl – a lady – with ideals and a plan. “You’ve really put a lot of thought into this, haven’t you?”

She blushed a little. “I guess. Ian’s probably done more of the work, really. The thing is, this sort of project needs funding. And _publicity_. People have to take it seriously.”

“You should’ve talked to Tony Stark. He’s back in town, you know. He’s a man for publicity, and he’s very wealthy.”

Darcy shrugged. “Maybe. But we don’t want the project itself to be funded out of S.H.I.E.L.D. or any of the Avengers. We want complete transparency, and financial independence from groups with whom we might have a conflict of interest. We want to facilitate the public in this stuff, so we thought the best thing was a Kickstarter.”

“A – uh – sorry –”

“Oh, I’m sorry,” Darcy said. She covered her face with her hands for a moment in a gesture of embarrassment.  “I’m so sorry, it’s, um, it’s a way to present an idea you want funding for to the public, and if any person likes your proposal they can donate money to your cause. We were hoping you could do a quick video about what you think about the project idea, and maybe tell people that it’s important for them to be informed and active in how the Earth is protected from superpowered threats, and understand them, and stuff.”

“You know,” Steve says, “this isn’t the first time I’ve been used to promote funding for a just cause.”

“I’m sorry,” Darcy said seriously. “I do know; I’ve seen the footage of that. Ian and I don’t want to use you. We want to ask for help getting done what we think should be done. If you disagree with me on how to deal with this, or you just don’t want to be involved, I understand. Really.” She looks at him earnestly. “Can I show you something? I want you to know. That I’m not using you, or lying to you, or anything.” Steve nodded, and she reached into her jacket pocket and drew out a necklace, a green jewel on a chain. She gestured towards him, making sure that he was okay if she put it in his hand, and he nodded again, distracted. The subtle shimmer of it ate up his vision; it took him in and didn’t let go. Almost like the Tesseract.

And then the warm café dissolved away, leaving nothing but the two of them in a dim green glow, and he saw Darcy Lewis. And he understands that she means exactly what she’s saying.

Her voice echoed slightly. “I was told to keep this a secret, but telling you through the thing – it’s called a soul stone, or so I’m told – anyway, it seemed safe enough. I figure if anyone can hear us in here, they already know where this thing is. You can sort of see me now, I hope.” Steve caught fleeting glimpses of her, her memories, a black bird, why she wanted to see him, Ian’s voice talking about what Darcy had been saying for the past hour. He could feel her need to help, and guilt, and fear for everyone. It was all honest. He saw her, and he knew she could see him.

“I don’t know exactly what’s best to do with it, or what all its powers are,” she said, “but I wanted to prove that I’m for real. If you trust me - I want to be sure I deserve it, and know I'm not misleading you about having this.”

And then they were back in the café, and Darcy was putting the gem back around her neck.

They made plans to meet the next day for her to film his statement, which she would use to promote her _Kickstarter_ (he’d have to ask Bruce or Tony or someone to explain it to him better). And just as she was going, he asked, “And after the video, what are you going to do?”

“Oh, hopefully cobble together some money and buy a plane ticket to London, so Ian and I can set everything up and launch the project. Plus there’s part of my thesis that’s an essay, it’s going to be based on the research and interviews with a few people who worked with the Strategic Scientific Reserve. Can’t really get in touch with any current S.H.I.E.L.D. personnel about current projects; that’s not going to get very far.”

He got out his cell phone then and there. With Darcy’s help, he found Tony Stark’s phone number and gave it to her, so she could talk to him about the project if she wanted, and maybe ask for money to fly out. “And this – there’s a number for someone you might speak to,” he said hesitantly. “Who worked as an advisor with the SSR in my days there. She might have some facts and opinions that could help you. She’s as smart and brave and true a friend –” It sounded all wrong, it wasn’t enough, there was never going to be a way to describe Peggy and what she did. And how she did it. “I can’t speak highly enough of her,” he said finally. “I –” There were tears in his eyes. _I would have danced with her_ , he wanted to say, but no words came out.

“Yeah,” Darcy Lewis said softly. She reached up to her collarbone and touched the green gem. “I don’t – I don’t have the right to say I understand what you’re dealing with. But I see it, I can feel that you feel it, and I’m sorry that you have this to deal with, because it’s not fair. And you least of all people deserve to have to deal with it, and really no one does. And if it weren’t too presumptuous or whatever, if there’s anything I can do for you, well, I was already in your debt long before today.” She shrugged awkwardly. She was kind, and that mattered. Kindness always mattered.

“You were never in my debt,” he managed to say.

 “Steve. Captain Rogers. I should just say that – I’m just a snarky up-jump with an alien empathy amplifier and something that passes for a conscience. You’re the real deal.”

They found Peggy’s number and said goodbye.

 

 

 

 

 


	3. Trust

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sif and the Warriors Three travel to Vanaheimr to deal with a threat, in the company of the Enchantress. What the threat behind the threat is, and what treachery may come remains unclear.

_"This above all: to thine ownself be true,_  
And it must follow, as the night the day,  
Thou canst not then be false to any man."

 

\- William Shakespeare, _Hamlet_

* * *

The Enchantress sits like Loki does. That’s what Sif notices when she should be paying attention to the battle arranged on the table before her. While the Warriors Three banter and eat and wager elsewhere on the _Trjegul_ , Lady Sif and Lady Freyja play at King’s-Table. Freyja of the Vanir, with her silken gold hair and emerald-bright eyes, is lounging carelessly. Wantonly, perhaps. To most onlookers she’d seem extravagantly bored, but Sif knows what to look for. The Enchantress is in control; she has a plan, one which amuses her mostly because she’s the only one who knows what it is. Very like Loki, that.

“I hope,” Sif says, “that your people are safe, Enchantress.” She places one of her dark red maids up a square, fearing, as she always does, that the move is a mistake and her whole defense will unravel before her eyes. _Defend the king; that is your purpose._ She looks for an opening, but no, there’s no escape route that she can see. Yet.

Freyja smiles. “Your courtesies are a comfort, I’m sure, Shieldmaiden,” she says lightly. She touches one white piece, then another, considering. “But that _is_ the reason we five have been sent, after all.”

“Are you not happy to visit your old home again?”

The Enchantress rolls her eyes. “On a warriors’ mission, no less,” she says. She moves her attacker, neatly capturing one of Sif’s pieces, which the Enchantress places with the others beside the board. Four red, now, and two white, dead. “There. Is it really a matter of speculation, whether I’m happy to go? On such a short leash, too. The line between guest and hostage is thin in the halls of Odin Allfather, you know, and for his sake I pretend not to realize what side of it he keeps me on.” Something about this strikes Sif as wrong. The Enchantress does most everything for her own sake. And she’s not as easily bound as she looks, either. “Well? The turn is yours, Sif.” She smiles gently, innocently. “What will you do now?”

For an instant Sif thinks about overturning the table and letting their game fall to chaos all over the floor, just to wipe that look off the Enchantress’ pretty face. It’s a far worse taunt than any smirk. _No_ , she tells herself. Better she prepare for whatever marauders are haunting Vanaheimr than work herself up over Freyja and her banter and the game. “I’ll excuse myself for the moment, if I may. I’d like to speak with the Warriors a while, and refresh myself.” Mayhap if she clears her head she’ll be able to rally her forces when she returns.

“Of course. It wouldn’t be fair of me to claim the pleasure of your company all for myself.” That damned smile again. 

Sif’s muscles are tense and her thoughts are unquiet as she takes her leave of the bridge; she loathes travelling the long way. One of the many hurts Loki has wrought with the destruction of the Bifröst. They have to travel Vanir-style, in a starship. That suits the Enchantress very well indeed, and Hogun, whom Sif had half forgotten is of Vanir blood, doesn’t seem to mind it. But it’s put her and the other two Warriors on edge. The Vanir maintain an unhealthy love of meandering through the void and settling the many bodies orbiting their sun, as if that made them lords of the rings and nebulae. Asgard has its throne, its grand city, its wilds, its domed sky, and needs no trappings else. It is designed for wandering and adventuring and courting and sparring at the most refined levels. Sif finds it hard to see spaceports and starship bridges as noble, or even quite civilized, especially since the Vanir do have the magic and sophistication to build Vanaheimr nearly to the glory of the Realm Eternal. It seems a bit perverse of them not to, as if all they care about is spiting the Aesir. But now’s the time for honoring alliances, not worrying over ancient squabbles. In the wake of all the upheavals, the last months have been strangely stagnant, and it makes Sif’s every hair prickle. The silent buzz in humid air, the calm before the storm.

“Thor should be here,” Fandral grumbles in her direction when she walks into their quarters, englassed so they can see the innumerable stars. “If the danger is as reported –”

“Are we to believe _all_ rumors?” Volstagg interjects.

“Were the threat great enough, Thor would come. With a fuller complement of Asgard’s warriors. I fear,” Sif says, smiling wryly, “that we’ve been made a sort of diplomatic presence, a reassurance that Asgard takes care for the welfare of Vanaheimr. Little else.”

“He still should be here,” Fandral says. “As the heir to Asgard’s throne, he’s certainly not unsuited for that task, and –”

“After Jötunheimr?” Sif asks. “That was a mistake.”

“After his deeds on Midgard,” Hogun says, “it would surely be no mistake to send Thor to Vanaheimr’s aid.”

Sif suppresses the urge to roll her eyes. “That he went to such lengths to save it from _Loki’s_ machinations? Is it impressive that he fought when the stakes were so personal? And what message would that send? Comparing the two realms is absurd. Even the Jötnar would take insult; they may be barbaric, but they and their world are fell and have been worthy as rivals of Asgard, if not honorable as her enemies. And certainly Vanaheimr does not lack for lore or elegance.”

Hogun thinks a moment. “Fandral, draw your blade a moment; I want to see it.”

Fandral grins, clearly suppressing some crude jest, but he does as he’s been asked, and hands it over. Hogun takes it in hand and plays the sour artificial light of the ship along its length. “This sword is a good sword,” he says. “Its edge is sharp; its shine is silver. But that’s not what I prize in battle. I value its balance in my hand, when I must face a foe.”

 “ _Midgard_ is the balance?” Sif asks.

“It is the middle of the Nine Realms. The fates of the other worlds bend to it.”

“Huh,” says Fandral, taking his foil back. “And what of –”

He’s interrupted by a crash. Several loud crashes, and the crunch of something crumpling inwards, and the hiss of escaping air. They all tumble to the metal floor, hard. Before Sif hits the ground, she’s moving, and rolls, keeping herself from getting tangled up with her sword as she falls. Training and the reflexes honed in scores of battles focus her every muscle. She’s up again before any of the Warriors, ready for the second tremor, and the next, and the next, bracing herself against the curved wall. Through the glass she sees bright blue flashes, swirling and clashing in the endless night as the starship starts to spiral out of control. It looks almost like lightning, but there is no sound. _Thor_ should _be here_ , Sif thinks, her guts twisting with dread.

“ _Enchantress?_ ” she shouts. “What is this?” No answer. “Where are you?”

The ship’s rattling calms a little; as soon as she’s steady on her feet Sif turns to her comrades.“Hogun, Fandral, Volstagg! Are you hurt?” She looks them over, and before they have time to answer her in words she hurtles back down the hall, towards the bridge. Everything’s still pitching. Are they falling? Can they even fall, in the depths of space? Sif can’t tell, and she hates that, and fears it. Without thinking, her sword is in her hand, at the ready. _I don’t trust this I don’t trust any of it_ , she thinks.

She makes it to the bridge and swallows a gasp. There’s another starship punched into the side of the _Trjegul_. It must have crashed into them. Its hull is a sweet dark blue metal, and its door, facing the interior of the starship, has buckled in the crash. Sif reaches to touch it. It’s so smooth that it slips from beneath her fingertips. The Enchantress is nowhere to be seen.

The ship jerks again, and this time Sif barely manages to keep herself upright. They’re still falling. If Thor were here, he wouldn’t hesitate. Sif takes the hatch in her grip and pulls. It does not give an inch.

“What –?” says Fandral, panting as he catches up to her; then, “ _Oh_.” Hogun and Volstagg, on his heels, stop and stare.

“No sign of Lady Freyja?” Hogun asks.

“No sign,” Sif replies quietly. “But I thought the starship could detect and respond to hostile movement.”

“I thought so, too,” says Hogun darkly. “And this looks to be a craft of these . . . marauders .”

“Whatever it is, if we can get this thing open, we’ll find out what’s happening.” Volstagg motions them out of the way and begins to pull at the door, then push. Sif glances around nervously. _Always remain aware of your surroundings_ , she thinks. All about the bridge little candle-bright lights are flickering frantically. Maybe they mean something to do with the ship, but Sif doesn’t know. The King’s-Table pieces are strewn across the floor, red and white together.

“Nothing,” Volstagg says, sagging against the hull of the pod. “No way in.”

Sif finds the crack, the gap between the door and frame. “Hm,” she says, and slips in the edge of her sword. Let them taste Asagard’s steel; her blade will not break. She throws her weight on the lever until she hears the grating of metal on metal, but it doesn’t give until Volstagg takes the hilt in hand and wrenches downward. The hatch creaks open, and they peer inside.

There’s no one and nothing within. Only a small room much like the _Trjegul_ ’s bridge; calm and empty of people or identifying features. It does look different from Vanir design, but only vaguely. Seeing the interior, Sif realizes the whole thing can’t be bigger than Heimdall’s observatory; it’s more a spacepod than a starship. “No one there?” she says, musing, “then why a ship, and not a missile to –”

“ _Behind us!_ ” Fandral shouts, and battle is upon them. A pale robed figure with veiled eyes, upright on two feet, bears down on them, swinging massive fists more swiftly and precisely than Sif would have thought possible, as she lifts her sword and dodges right. It isn’t fighting blind. She’s a hair too slow to avoid the hit, and the monster pins her arm to the floor. She struggles for a moment, trying to get her sword hand free, until she hears the whip of air and then the _crunch_ of Hogun’s morningstar crashing into flesh. The foe’s grip loosens for an instant, and Sif slips away. She nods her thanks to Hogun and throws herself back into battle as whole ship jolts again, cutting her momentum short. Are they spiraling down into a lonely star in the wastes between Asgard and the Vanaheimr system? No time to worry. Move. Fight.

She gets a good shot at the thing, as its attention is taken up by Hogun and Fandral, who are fighting side-by-side, and slashes for all she’s worth. Her Asgardian steel digs deep into the thing’s skin. She draws back a moment and looks it over, hoping to find a weak spot or at least take advantage of the wound Hogun dealt it in her follow-up, but its massive arm is barely scraped. And there’s only a thin purplish line where she just struck its flank. Its flesh is knitting together even as she watches.

 She feints left and it dodges her, colliding with the wall. Heaving forward she hits home at its chest, her blade tearing through dark blue robes and darker meat. _It’s not used to fighting in enclosed spaces_ , she thinks, and then she doesn’t think at all, she just moves _._ Beside her, Volstagg meets her eyes. She nods, and they lift their swords together and charge.

It sidesteps Sif and knocks Volstagg over with one arm; in its other it holds Hogun, whom it casually throws to the floor. For a moment, he doesn’t stir, and Sif’s breath catches in her lungs, but then he slowly lifts himself to his feet, and Fandral shouts at him to move back. With the monster blocking their escape from the bridge, all he can do is scramble into the open hatch of the crashed spacepod while Sif and the other two Warriors keep fighting.

“What –” Sif shouts, as she parries its punches, and tries, fruitlessly, to get on the offensive – “ _are you?_ ”

The thing only twists its strange mouth into what looks like a grin. “I am something _Other_ ,” it says in a deep, rasping voice, “and in service to one yet greater.” Volstagg tries to take advantage of its distraction and gets flung into Fandral for his trouble.

 _It has to be working with the Enchantress_ , Sif thinks. She’s never trusted her. Loki had also never truly earned Sif’s trust, and in the end, though it took centuries, he proved himself utterly unworthy of it. She should have knocked over the game of King’s-Table and punched Freyja in the face for good measure before any of this could have started. If the Enchantress makes it back to a Vanir spaceport and claims that Asgard refused aid, or attacked her, or anything, there will be war, and more war; the state of peace between the realms, so fragile since the breaking of the Bifröst, will shatter even more ruinously than anyone has feared –

“Sif!” Fandral shouts, and she snaps to attention in time to see him try to trip their enemy, who’s coming down on her. She lifts her sword to meet it, but it moves to bash Fandral in the side. The whole ship jerks and rolls, spinning so they crash into the ceiling and floor and ceiling again before it stabilizes at an odd tilt. Fandral is collapsed in the angle between walls and floor. Sif doesn’t waste her breath cursing the Enchantress for his pain. She blocks it all out.

“Fandral – with Hogun. Go!” She sees that he makes it into the spacepod, and nods to herself, satisfied. There’s a chance. Only Sif and Volstagg are left on the bridge now, and they’re getting pressed hard now, losing ground, moving backwards, trying to keep the thing off them. _If we can only tire it out, if we can only distract it_ , Sif thinks, panting hard, eyes darting left and right again. They’re tiring quickly, too, and it’s only hitting harder. Already it has brought two of its foes to the ground. But she has a _plan_.

“Thor’s hammer will smash your skull to shards!” she shouts suddenly. It swerves to give her its black veiled stare; she looks back with only fury and defiance. Again she steps forward, slashing, meeting and shoving off its forearm and falling back as swiftly as she can. “And whoever you serve – Prince Thor will _bring to its knees_.” The change she’s caused in its movement with her outburst is slight, but Sif can see it, take advantage of it long enough to meet Volstagg’s gaze and nod her head at the open pod hatch. Fandral and Hogun are just inside, waiting for a chance. Volstagg smiles grimly and she moves in close. He forces the monster to change direction, and Sif draws the monster onto her.

It pursues and she retreats towards the spacepod. _It’s just like King’s-Table_ , Sif thinks _. Capture him between us._ Then it has her up against the hull, its huge mouth grinning obscenely, nowhere for her to run.

But it’s too big. The thrust at Sif’s face glances off the edge of the doorway, and Volstagg hits it with all his weight, knocking it off balance and rolling himself into the spacepod as he does. She ducks underneath and out of the thing’s reach. It collapses into the spacepod’s doorway, slipping down it, growling as Hogun and Fandral catch it on blade and mace. It goes down hard, on its knees; the gossamer-fine robes are torn to threads, finally staining with a blue-purple ichor. Volstagg gives a shout of battle-joy, but Sif merely smiles with relief. She can wait a moment to celebrate their –

It strikes like a snake, in the blink of an eye snapping forward and launching itself at the Warriors Three.

Sif reaches with all her strength and speed and grabs it, pulling it down onto her before it can attack her friends. She unbalances it, but its whole weight comes down on her. It turns its head to give her a look she can read without seeing its eyes: _Whose skull did you say will get smashed to shards?_ She struggles and it brings its arm and body around to smash her into the floor, but she still has her blade, and holds it steady as its exposed jaw comes down; it may heal too quickly to kill easily, but she can take it with her, put her sword through its throat –

It jerks away from her and flies through the air to slam heavily into the far wall, as if an enormous finger has flicked it aside. Before Sif can think to wonder how, she’s yanked by her collar into the spacepod, and the hull slams shut. She falls the floor, shuddering with exertion and dread. Are the Warriors here? She hears their voices. _Breathe deep, stay aware._

A hand gentler than any of the Warrior’s helps her sit up. “You were marvelous, Sif,” says the mellifluous voice of the Enchantress. “I couldn’t have done it without you,” she says, smiling radiantly.

In a pulse of fury Sif grabs her by the shoulder and brings her blade, still dripping dark ichor, to point at Freyja’s white neck. In one motion she stands up and pushes the Enchantress back until she has her against the wall, and the Warriors Three gather around the two of them.

“ _Tell us what you did_ ,” Sif says, slowly, deliberately. “Or I’ll slit your throat.”

 “I decided I’d rather play the hunter than the hunted is all,” The Enchantress says lightly, not looking at the sword. “And I expected my friends of Asgard would feel the same.”

“Did you know it was going to crash into us, then?” Volstagg asks.

“I knew,” Freyja says, “that it was planning to take _Trjegul_ unaware, disable her, possibly take us prisoner. Perhaps kill us, if necessary, torture information out of us if it could. I _think_ it is involved with the marauders at Vanaheimer, though I can’t be certain. Yet.” She shrugs gracefully. “I adjusted our trajectory so it lost control and crashed into our starship. And when it did . . .”

“You made yourself invisible,” Sif says, starting to piece it together. “The monster left this vessel and you stepped in, but it didn’t even know you were there, did it?”

“Seiðr _is_ a useful tool, don’t you agree?”

“Keeping out of battle, hanging back, scheming; if that’s what you mean by _seiðr_ ,” Fandral says angrily. Sif winces. It’s not something she trusts, but then wasn’t what she herself had done a trick, luring the monster into a space too tight for it to fight them off?

“You left us to face it in battle, safe while we were in peril.” Volstagg says.

“If you fell, my friends, I was doomed myself. My power is not of the sort that I could defeat it on my own.” _Some people can talk their way out of anything_ , Sif thinks, but it’s probably true. That doesn’t mean it’s not a trick, though.

“And now you’ve trapped us in here,” she retorts. “Only you can steer the ship. And we will be taken as foes of Asgard and Vanaheimr by our allies.”

“ _Now_ we are well disguised and can investigate and fight these mysterious marauders with impunity. They should believe we’re one of them until _we_ choose to reveal ourselves. Our attacker, meanwhile, is trapped in a doomed starship. I caught it at the exact speed and angle to explode the engines serially and catch the ship in the gravity well of a barren star. A pity about the _Trjegul_ , I suppose; she was certainly a pretty one.” The Enchantres places her slender white hand on the point of Sif’s sword, just touching it, and gently pushes it aside. “Heimdall will report our status to Asgard; we are safe enough, if we are careful. And now, as you said, I ought to get to piloting our current vessel.”

“Sorcery,” Sif mutters, lowering the sword, watching the Enchantress gracefully take her place at the helm of the little craft. Battle is the only magic Sif truly understands, rage and sweat and sublime concentration, sending a blade exactly where she wills it, without thinking that she wants it there. _Placement, direction, power_.  Is seiðr the same? Perhaps, but Sif likes it less for that, not more.

“There,” Fandral sighs, “goes one woman even I will never comprehend.”

“ _Even you_ ,” Volstagg says, rolling his eyes before bursting into incredulous laughter. “ _One woman_.”Grim Hogun joins in, and Sif begins to laugh herself, mostly in relief that her friends are safe, the battle won, for now.

“We will have a tale to tell Thor when this is done,” Volstagg says.

“We will,” Sif agrees. If they and Thor are all alive and whole, she thinks. “More than one, I’ll wager.”

She waves the Warriors away once they begin comparing their bruises and gashes, not a game she’s ever cared for, though she can outfight them all in battle. Instead she makes her way over to the Enchantress, at the helm, and sets herself in the place of the second-in-command, in a chair far too large for her – shaped to hold something at least as big as the Other. All the screens and signs Sif can’t read flash and bubble with lights. The Enchantress calmly takes them all in; she doesn’t say a word, but waits, patiently. Sitting magnificently.

“You really _are_ too much like Loki,” Sif says finally.

“Oh, sweet Sif. You cannot know how you lighten my heart, saying that.” The Enchantress runs a hand through her long bright hair. Bright as Sif’s was, long ago.

“It gladdens you, that I compare you to – to the _traitor_ who –”

The Enchantress just shakes her pretty head. “Thor loves no one as he loves Loki. I envy that.” Her eyes unfocus a moment, and Sif swallows hard. “I admire his cleverness, too. Loki is the only one who’s ever beaten me at King’s-Table, you know.” She glances up at Sif. “Ah. I’m sorry about our game. Truly.”

“It is no matter.” Probably, Sif guesses, the Enchantress deliberately tried to drive her away from the table so she could crash the foe – the _Other_ – into the _Trjegul_. “But you will have to count me as another who’s bested you at King’s-Table. My King’s escaped your capture, hasn’t he?” Sif grins.

The Enchantress gives her that same innocent look. “Indeed?” she asks. She reaches into a fold of her gown and pulls out the crimson King.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Still AU for Thor: The Dark World, buuuuuut I like a lot of what happened in it, and, as you can see (though this was written months ago) some elements should be incorporated as this (I hope) eventually continues. At least the whole convergence thing should help me not be written into a corner with the Earth plotline . . . maybe . . .

**Author's Note:**

> Notes on the canonicity: My hope is to keep this technically within the bounds of Marvel Cinematic Universe canon and shade into more mythology compatibility.
> 
> I hope I'll get some further chapters done eventually, but apologize in advance for not getting them written in a timely fashion. And rest assured that they'll include a much greater variety of characters and situations than this one did . . .
> 
> Cookies to those who get the title.


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